Advice for Rookie You?

[Dan Waxman]

I walked into FRC with a decent amount of programming knowledge, and ended up writing a very high volume of the code that was on the robot. However, while doing everything by myself, I admittedly did a very poor job of leading and distributing work. I also stuck to that stereotype of a programmer in a cave that can't hold a hammer right, and as a result still don't know a ton of mechanical skills, and the ones I did learn were all in a short period of time under less than ideal circumstances. So my advice for myself would be the following:

- Distribute the work. You have the technical knowledge, now gain the leadership skills and learn to act like a project lead instead of the only programmer.

- Branch out to other things as well. The code for the robot doesn't take very long to write, especially if you're working with multiple other programmers. Learning some mechanical skills and realize prototyping at the start of build season will only benefit you.