Should you Whiteboard before or during your coding session?

Regardless of what language you code in, should you be coding without white-boarding? Short answer is NO.

Why you may ask? Well let me tell you from personal experience even when I have a very defined plan from the very beginning of my process/function more often than not that plan is a lot better in my head than it is in reality, when i say white-boarding I don’t mean it in the literal sense of it; what i mean is put your plan in be it pseudocode or or a literal whiteboard.

I can’t tell you how many hours of work i have sunk into a function that ultimately had to delete, because it did not account for edge cases or it did not account for some other feature that i cannot rely on. This post is more to get you to desing a plan for your code before you get tot the coding part.

Imagine this, you’re building a house:

1. You have a good idea of what the house should look like.
2. You have built houses before.
3. You may even have some assistants for this building project.
4. You should be ready to go?

No, if you don’t have a plan for the construction:

1. How would you know what materials to get?
2. Are you gonna put bricks on top of each other and hope it turns into a house at some point?
3. What about the measures of that house?
4. Where are the connections for the utilities?
5. Are the windows the same size? Do you even have windows ? Are you gonna tear down the wall you just built to make a window?
6. Would you live in that house?

A function or an app is no different in that sense, where do the files connect? are you gonna build and destroy functions as you go?.

Despite how tedious it may seem at the beginning a good and solid plan will save not only time in the long run when you build something knowing fully well its purpose, but may also help you see flaws in you logic before the fact so you don’t have to deal with the consequences of it either, and many more than that, I promise you 15 mins can easily save you 2 hours of “why is my code not working”.

So just plan it out, its in YOUR best interest.