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10 Comments

The art of the minimal example

  1. 1

    Writing about 'minimals' on a minimal blog ... I love it.

    I think you are on to something when it comes to enhancing one's portfolio with smaller code examples. I fall into the category of wanting to showcase only large projects I have worked on. Yet, we write so much useful code over the years that is all too often destined to collect dust in a deeply nested dev folder somewhere in the seedy backstreets of our drives. Exposing those snippets on a portfolio seems to be a win win, especially in the age of Covid. To revisit these older experiments will be an interesting trip down memory lane.

    Thanks for the push in the right direction.

  2. 1

    If I understand correctly what do you mean as minimal examples it's a powerful debugging technique. Also it's a thing that many developers struggle to do - narrow down the problem to the essential part. When it's done, removing the problem is usually easy.

    I'd love to see your series on minimals.

    1. 2

      Thanks for your comment @sadamiak.

      Yeah it takes a long time to get good at it. I’m still learning how todo it better after many many years.

      The first step, was to get in the habit of actually using the technique, it’s so easy to forget, especially when you are exhausted from working on a problem for a long time.

      Over time you start to notice minimal examples by others, and you admire their brevity and focus.

      You find yourself thinking in terms of minimal examples. What’s the absolute simplest way I could describe this thing, which aspects need to be highlighted, what data needs to be presented, can I remove anything from this and still communicate the essence?

      Good to hear it’s a topic area that resonates.

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        I always feel like being in a minority when I say I like debugging and fixing things. I like your approach, as it cuts into the essence and demands structured, elegant thinking.

        1. 2

          Nice of you to say that -!thanks

  3. 1

    @mjgs Great blog post! I didn't about this particular support inside Stack Overflow. Are you into web development directly?

    1. 1

      Thanks for the comment.

      I’m not sure what you mean by ‘support’. Stackoverflow is a question and answers site.

      I am into web development directly in the sense that I am a web developer.

      Does that answer your question?

      1. 1

        Yes I am aware about stack overflow. I meant I wasn't aware that the support section had such examples ready to refer :)

        And that's really great! In that case, you might find my product, ruttl quite useful. I have built it specially keeping in mind the issues web developers face!

        If you are interested, you can directly use it here.

  4. 1

    Hey Mark 👋

    I've recently been doing a bit of development to see if I could build an idea I have. I've also been building "minimals" as small proof of concepts and it has been a great way to learn and try things out.

    You mentioned that you're doing this to learn specific features. Perhaps you could include some of those learnings in a blog post to help others who are trying to learn similar things?

    1. 1

      Thanks for the comment @austerberry.

      I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post series about the minimals for a while now. This post was sort of testing the waters a bit.

      It’s not something I have time to do anytime soon, but it’s good to know that there is a bit of an appetite for such content :)

      In the mean time all the Github repos are linked to from my portfolio.

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