Dear Readers!
Today’s lesson is about organizing your classes. For quite some time I just created small learning projects, which hardly grew so large to become hard to keep track of all classes and member functions, etc. in my head. My last such learning project however grew so quickly, that trying to keep everything in my head became problematic overnight. I never suspected that project size can grow this fast, but it seems the rumors are true: projects do grow like weed.
So, to be able to manage everything nicely, I needed a simple tool that doesn’t get in my way. Interestingly enough, the solution found me back way before I needed it during a random changelog review, where I found out, that Kate, KDE’s powerful text editor, started to ship with a ktexteditorpreviewplugin. I was quite entusiastic about it, becuase I’m using Markdown to format my blogposts, and this plugin is able to render the result in Kate’s side panel on the fly, which makes writing posts a bit easier (I’m not required to start ‘jekyll serve’). So why was this a solution for my current problem? Because this plugin is also capable of rendering UML alongside Markdown, but at the time I simply wasn’t interested in it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know UML existed up until that moment, so the only thing I did was to find out the basics about it.
And I’m glad I did it, because now I have the right tool under my sleeve. The only question remains what editor to use. There is a nice collection of them here, but I’m also considering some online editors like draw.io (which also happens to have a free and open source desktop app) to make the diagrams as universally available as possible. Time will tell which is best. So, today’s lesson is:
Map your classes visually as soon as possible.
As always, thanks for reading.