Robot Simulation

Some house keeping

Code

Make sure that code is well commented and clean. If you have no idea what consitutes that then you can google for something along the lines of how to write clean code and there will be a guide. What's currently in the develop branch shouldn't be too far off either.

Basically don't try sending a pull request full of spaghetti.

Git

There's a reason I put so much stress on Git in the first week.

Using Git

You should be familiar with how to use Git at this point.

From the first weeks notes the following should have been

• Read through the Intro to GitHub sheet on Moodle
• Go through the following videos video one, video two.

If you have a problem you should

• Google it
• Search Stackoverflow
• Make a post on Reddit or Stackoverflow
• Message me with all the info, don't just say 'why won't x work', send commands that you entered etc.

If you're careful there shouldn't be much of an issue.

A possible workflow

• create an issue addressing something
• state that you're going to address the issue
• fork the repo to your branch
• clone the repo to your local machine
• git checkout develop to make sure you're building off the develop branch (in some cases there might be a different branch to work from, it more than likely won't be the master though)
• Create a new branch off the develop branch git branch <what-im-going-to-do
• implement changes
• create a sensible commit message
• push the new branch up to your remote repository
• create a pull request based on the develop branch (unless there was another one that was meant to have been worked on) of the main repo (on my page)
• Wait for response / message me about it.

That's a rough outline, if there's anything in there that you're not sure about then you should go over the material again or google it. Make sure that when you're going over material you're actually practicing on a repository as the only way for this to sink in is to actually mess about with things.

Learning to use it from PyCharm will also make your life easier, though you should be also aware of what commands are being used.

Edit files online in GitHub

You can edit files online in the webapp if it's just a quick change or addition (to documentation or such ) this can be handy. It will offer to create a branch automatically for you at the time.

Don't try programming here.

Issues

You should be checking out the issues regularly and contributing to them. If there's anything that you want to implement then you should create an issue that addresses it so that others know what you're doing. You should also state that you're working on it as well. It's quite alright to create an issue that you're not working on immediately, just if there's something that you feel should be considered by others or whatever that's a valid reason for an issue. They have different labels that I can apply so that we can see what needs to be done quickly. These are important.

DON'T CREATE MASSIVE ISSUES

No one likes massive issues and it's just asking for something to go wrong. Create small issues where the gist of what's being done can be summed up in the heading. Something like Create interface would be way too vague for example, as this is probably going to have a hundred smaller jobs in it. At the same time creating one such as type print(n) to see value of n in my code would be useless for hopefully obvious reasons. A better approach might be to Implement button to set <x> value.

Local code is useless

If you have work on your computer locally for project purposes it might as well not exist (up to a point). If no one can see it / understand it / use it then what's the point?

Using Github properly will enable people to work on more things faster as everyone should be implementing small parts of the program.

Trying to work on too much at once is going to cause problems because the project might have moved on or in a different direction in the time you've been working in isolation.

Make sure you're up to date!

Don't think that you can fork the repo and that's it. You might find that your repo is behind the master repository and if you try and make changes on that you might bring up a load of merge conflicts.

Keeping the code up to date is important

Documentation

I'm trying to document things in here so that others can see what's going on and what's been implemented. If you work on something it might take you a while to figure something out and writing out some info for others will enable them to learn from that as well as you and should make the project easier to understand overall. Of course the code itself should be pretty readable but for somethings it can help to have a bit more of a verbose / prose explanation for things.

Please contribute to this.