View Single Post
  #16   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 10-11-2012, 22:58
gluxon's Avatar
gluxon gluxon is offline
\n
AKA: Brandon Cheng
FRC #0178 (The 2nd Law Enforcers)
Team Role: Leadership
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Rookie Year: 2011
Location: Connecticut
Posts: 65
gluxon has a spectacular aura aboutgluxon has a spectacular aura aboutgluxon has a spectacular aura about
Re: Too many programmers ?

We had similar numbers for our team in terms of response in interest of Programming. This really went down, and there's really only been 2 or 3 people involved since then.

I really believe our problem is that we spent more time "doing" than "teaching". People stopped coming over when they did not understand what was happening, which is the general nature of things. Programming is more informational than other committees, and it should be taught as much as possible. Experienced programmers should not be touching code, but guiding. Take a look at this idea from Malcolm Gladwell's book (Outliers), quoted from Derek Sivers.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Derek Sivers - http://sivers.org/book/Outliers
Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up. Combating mitigation.
Managed properly, Programming can have as many people work on code as possible. For the best example of this, I like to look at Mozilla. They are one of the largest Open Source projects, and still manage to organize their enormous code base. One of the reasons why their applications rarely have security flaws is due to the fact that more experienced programmers are generally reviewers, while contributors from all around the world write code. Also as important, they have set up a very efficient code versioning system with Mercurial. I recommend doing something similar. Our team uses GitHub, allowing us to track changes everyone makes, and review code before it is pushed.

There is always something to do, or something to try with Programming. It's not confined by tools, but contribution. Good this year!