For me, that is my ~/git/scratch repo (formerly ~/hg/scratch). I have a lot of experiments in there: different approaches to parsing; R/OCaml/Lua experiments; tests for interactions between Unix signals, processes, and threads; etc. One thing I've also found useful is: whenever you see a neat code snippet on Hacker News or a blog, download the code, and write a shell script to build and demo it. You don't even have t…
What do you mean by "write a shell script to build and demo it"? Pardon my ignorance.
And more often than not I add my own tests and demos. Sometimes I write a main() program, if it's C. If it's JS, then add an HTML skeleton and a script that runs a web server to demo it (e.g. python -m SimleHTTPServer). If it's Python, install any deps necessary. And often you will want to run the same script with many parameters to fully demo it.
The idea is to basically prove to yourself that the code works, without necessarily having to understand everything about it. Then when you see it later, your brain knows you can go back to it. You won't feel lazy like "oh man I have to go back and find the web page I saw 3 months ago, download code, pore through instructions to figure out how to build it". That part is already done.
For example, here's a snippet I did when testing out cityhash. It's usually much messier/longer than this.
run.sh:
#!/bin/bash
readonly CITY_SRC=~/src/cityhash-1.1.1
download() {
... ...
}
hello() {
g++ -I$CITY_SRC -I$CITY_SRC/src -o hello $CITY_SRC/src/city.cc hello.cc
./hello "$@"
}
"$@"
hello.cc:
#include
#include // strlen
#include "city.h"
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
if (argc >= 2) {
char* s = argv[1];
unsigned u = CityHash32(s, strlen(s));
printf("hash = %x\n", u);
return 3;
}
}