[CharlieDigital]

I have a directory on my drive called `sandbox` where I basically throw together small toys for anything with some unknown complexity. Anything from how an ORM might model a specific type of relationship (throw together a basic replica with a Docker compose file) to replicating the deployment model (poking AWS Copilot, for example) to testing out some tooling flow (e.g. local build process change).

The main thing with a toy model is speed. You can build/deploy/test with a smaller scope and progressively scale it up some reasonable scale of the full thing (whatever you're testing for) and you can iterate your testing faster. But many times, the key issues show up quite early in the process of grokking the toy model.

[berkes]

I too have this "sandbox" directory. I use it for what you say. But also for troubleshooting, bugreports or a stackoverflow question.

Just throw up a new project, hack around in it for an hour, and most often the problem/bug in my original code becomes apparent because of the isolation. I'll easily write four such sandbox projects per week.

[w0m]

'scratch' for me. Everything from quick regex tests to full library rewrites tend to start there.