What do your programmers do when programming has finished?

[Woolly]

Originally Posted by Thunder910

We have been working our programmers to DEATH improving our Auto routines. If you're "done" then I assume you have a number of reliable auto routines that you can pick from to coordinate with your alliance partners as well?
I would HOPE so.

Or maybe something to where the drivers can change certain values for autonomous on the dashboard right before the match based on your alliance partner's preferences.
Especially useful if a programmer is on your driver team.

[faust1706]

I finished my program week 5 of build season. It was functional and did it's job. My mentor always says "great, now here's more things to do" and hands me a list. Today I woke up with a text message from my mentor saying "I've emailed you things you need to have done for Terra Houte" There are at least 5 things he's given me to do. Long story short, one can always improve code, make it cleaner, run faster. A programmers job is never done, unless, of course, it is the "dead zone." That is the week before competition and inorder to change the code on the robot, 2 students and a mentor must be aware of what is being changed.

[toastnbacon]

Yah, there's no such thing as done. Either look through the code and see how you can improve it (keeping the original as a backup, of course) or learn something new! Like TheSoftwareGuy said, knowing how the electronics works is a big help for a programmer. But if you're sure you are done, minesweeper is a great way to kill time.

[Sean Raia]

You are never done programming, and that's what makes it fun.

Develop better sensor feedback and debug output.

[Jon Stratis]

This is engineering. Nothing is ever done. It might be "good enough", it might be at a state where "I think this'll work", but it's never done! Even in the off season, we're making changes and reprogramming things.

Heck, just last week we sat down and did a code review (the programming team presented the code to the main programming mentor, myself, and the programming teacher at the school, who is taking the year off from the team). During the review, we changed a few things that needed changing, discovered the cause (and the fix) of the only real issue we had noticed in the robot's performance, and created a list of stuff that should be done for the code. And this is after having a very successful regional up in Duluth a few weeks ago (placing 4th)!

[ctccromer]

I helped build our pit and plan on making a video explaining the entirety of our code as a nice resource for future FRC programmers. But yeah, the post-build season is much less demanding than the build season