Ask HN: Latest guidelines on how to set up a project in X langauge

2 points by rrishi 1 year ago | 1 comment

Hey HN,

A lot of you are probably acquainted with the resource learnxinyminutes. It provides a decently wide peep into a language's syntax and basics.

But often that's not sufficient to build anything decent by the latest guidelines/conventions of the language's community.

For example, look at this https://matt.sh/python-project-structure-2024. The author has done an excellent job of distilling the best practices associated with python.

Is there a resource like this for other languages ? Ideally something like learnxinyminutes for setting up projects in a language and idioms etc.

austin-cheney 1 year ago |

I don't mess with tech stacks, so I immediately jump to the business end of things.

1. Start with a specific goal. What is the thing I want to build and what 1 problem does it solve. Other features can come later.

2. Backwards plan. You generally know what you need to make this 1 thing work and some vague idea of how to organize the pieces. What ever is missing then becomes either a gap or a dependency. If you have written a lot of original software you are in a fantastic place because you can butcher from prior projects.

3. Start with the entry point. In Rust its fn main. As a TypeScript lover I just create some arbitrary file.

4. Build the platform code required by your language. In Rust its a crates file and in Node its a package.json file.

5. Bring in only the dependencies requires to build the minimal code.

6. Get as far as you can before you need additional dependencies.

This is how to get up and running doing real automation as quickly as possible.