I’m just generalizing, like if you want to copy some cleaver feature or modify some Python program you came across, what are the red or green flags indicating how well your (or particularly some hobbyist’s/your early learning self’s) results are likely to turn out?
Also how can you tell when reading into such a project is going to be a major project that is beyond the scope of you ultimate goals. For instance, I wanted to modify Merlin 3d printer firmware for hardware that was not already present in the project, but as an Arduino copy pasta hobbyist, despite my best efforts, that was simply too much for me to tackle at the time because of the complexity of the code base and my limited skills.
How do you learn to spot these situations before diving down the rabbit hole? Or, to put it another way, what advice would you give yourself at this stage of the learning curve?
The title question is very broad, varied, and difficult. It depends.
For anything that is not a small script or small, obvious and obviously scoped takes, you can’t assess at first glance.
So for a project/task/extension like you wrote it’s a matter of:
Is there docs or guide specifically for what I want to do/add? If yes, the expectation is it is viable and reasonably doable with low risk.
If there is no guide the assessment is already an exploration and analysis. How is the project structured, is there docs for it or my concerns, where do I expect it as to go and what does it have to touch, what’s the risks of issues and unknown difficulties and efforts. The next step would already be prototyping, and then implementing. Both of which can be started with a “let’s see” and timebox approach where you remain mindful of when known or invested effort or risk increases and you can stop or rethink.
Generally mostly by cyclomatic complexity:
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How big are the methods overall
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Do methods have a somewhat single responsibility
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How is the structure, is everything inner-connected and calling each other, or are there some levels of orchestration?
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Do they have any basic unittests, so that if I want to add anything, I can copypaste some test with an entrypoint close to my modifation to see how things are going
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Bonus: they actually have linter configuration in their project, and consistent commonly used style guidelines
If the code-structure itself is good, but the formatting is bad, I can generally just run the code though a linter that fixes all the formatting. That makes it easier to use, but probably not something I’d actually contribute PRs to
How do you learn to spot these situations before diving down the rabbit hole? Or, to put it another way, what advice would you give yourself at this stage of the learning curve?
Probably some kind of metric of “If I open this code in an IDE, and add my modification, how long will it take before I can find a suitable entrypoint, and how long before I can test my changes” - if it’s like half a day of debugging and diagnostics before I even can get started trying to change anything, it’s seems a bit tedious
Edit: Though also, how much time is this going to save you if you do implement it? If it saves you weeks of work once you have this feature, but it takes a couple of days, I suppose it’s worth going though some tedious stuff.
But then again: I’d also check: are there other similar libraries with “higher scoring” “changeability metrics”
So in your specific case:
I wanted to modify Merlin 3d printer firmware
Is there any test with a mocked 3d printer to test this, or is this a case of compiling a custom framework, installing it on your actual printer, potentially bricking it if the framework is broken - etc etc
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