Mistakes

[Branden Ghena]

Last year at Great Lakes Regional we had a bug in our autonomous code (not surprising as I hadn't been able to test it) and needed to debug. I was the head programmer for my team, and I got to work.

I created a while loop that read sensor data and output them to screen continuously, and put it in the top of the autonomous program. I found the bug, but forgot to remove the test from the code, so all auton mode long our robot sat in debug mode. Thank goodness operator mode still worked. In forgetting to remove the test, I had cost myself and the rest of my team an entire autonomous mode's worth of operation.

The worst part though was when it happened again two matches later.

The blame totally fell on me, which was correct as it was definitely my responsibility to get the autonomous mode working. The experience was very disheartening at the time, but as a programmer it has taught me to think more about my code and what I am doing/have changed recently, and especially to learn from my mistakes in order to keep from repeating them.