FRC Blog - Openness and Vulnerability

[JoshSmith]

I'd like to just vouch for Frank and his commitment to FRC. Granted, this the only time that I've directly spoken with him but it stood out to me. At one point during the championships this year, FRC Spyder went down and no one from Galileo was able to get score updates. I went searching around and found out that the FIRST website for the Galileo division was also down. After a period of me trying to figure out who to talk to, Dan Green got me over to Frank and I told him what was wrong.

(A bit of side info, but this is right next to the Galileo field while he was running around checking how the matches were going)

He said he wasn't aware of any issues but tried to pull up the Galileo website. Sure enough, it was still down and Spyder wasn't working. Without missing a beat, he told me, "I'll get this fixed immediately" (or something close to those lines) and began making calls. After about 15 minutes (more or less as lack of sleep made times a bit fuzzy), the Galileo site came back online and Spyder picked up where it left off.

Although some people could say that this is just a normal occurrence, I'm still very appreciative of how he dropped what he was doing to help fix a "non-critical" issue. So, two thumbs up there!

The other thing I've noticed is just what he outlined in this post. The openness by FIRST is apparent compared to previous years. It's something I've wished there was more of and this championship it was a common theme. FTAs had no problem explaining various bits that go into the scoring process and how scores are eventually determined, put online, and corrected. I think that keeping things as open-source (on the software side of things) and publicly available, will ultimately help FIRST and avoid issues down the road. Kudos Frank for pushing this.