We have had about 5-9 programmers per year, but it seems that every year, one student does 75+% of the programming for the robot, and three do 99%. The other programmers never seem to "gel". My personal suspicion is related to time spent programming (whether learning, for other things, or on the robot) outside of regular build hours. Most individuals will never become an effective programmer if (s)he only puts in a few hours a week, a few months a year.
If this is clearly communicated up front, perhaps you will have fewer applicants, and among the ones you get will be the ones you need.
Quote:
Originally Posted by aeastet
My plan for this up coming season is to break the programming group into a few groups. I will have a couple of teams that program the robot and a few that are working on the dashboard.
|
I'm not sure of our tasking/breakdown our first three years, but this is what we did last year; each person was lead on one or two sub-system, and they worked with a buddy or two to bounce ideas and help each other, plus mentors. At the end, our lead and deputy programmers (a senior and a junior) wound up doing most of the tasks assigned to everyone else. A third programmer, a freshman, got his stuff at least mostly done, but was busy as a driver by the time we were taking care of loose ends. The deputy and "third" have returned; the other programmers have not showed up to tryouts, so we will be taking another crop of new programmers. There have been at least two at tryouts who show promise.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EmileH
I highly recommend [G]it[Hub] to help keep the organization of new and old code clean and organized.
|
+1 - It's a great "time machine" resource if you're coding by yourself. It (or something similar) is indispensable if you have two or more on your programming team.