I have been working pretty solidly on my Traveller application for the past week. Where ever I find a spare second I open my IDE and start doing some programming. Lately it has been doing the GUI simply so I can share the material I have done with the community. GUI’s are a nightmare by the way. So many hours spent thinking about how it should look and behave to introduce a tool for everyone rather than just setting it up so I can use it.
Anyhow, I opened the code up to the general public programmer via Github at the request of a person that was interested in the code. I thought this a good idea if someone has the skills they can contribute by cleaning up my mess after I plough through the implementation. I know there are quite a few people out there that have computing skills so I threw it out there.
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| The GUI as it stands at the moment… |
I don’t often get to my emails every day and so it was yesterday that I found myself trying to sort the chaff from the gems that I came across something where somebody took a “branch” in my Github and changed stuff and pushed it back for me to merge. I had not heard of Github prior to around a month and a half ago and I am certainly no major user and this was definitely the first time that I had come across this stuff. I puzzled out that I could go and look at the changes and so I did.
A lot of the work appeared to be cleaning up my dice generator software. I instantiated (created) too many of them through the code which would clog up memory and it was one of the mental notes I had to go back and fix. Well, it looked like this person “Dark Mane” had altered around the code a bit and fixed it for me so I hit the merge button and it overwrote all my files on my little hard drive with the new material.
Keen to look at the changes I went back to my Integrated Development Environment (IDE fancy word for software designed to help writing code) and my pages lit up red with errors. It is important to note that at this stage I knew it was not from the coding. The coder that helped me knew what he was doing, the errors were due to the fact that I had not got some of the source code libraries that he was using in my code. So I went searching for these libraries so I could include them. To make sure I was getting the right stuff I went through the changes he had offered to my code and was a little stunned!
I consider myself a good programmer. I feel I have some skills rom going through my Uni course and doing a lot of programming but this person made me feel like I knew very little about real programming. He showed me some material I had never used before but I knew existed, and there was stuff in the code that I knew nothing about! I have to break out my humble pie again as I am not worthy!
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| Coding, coding, coding! |
So, today I have part of a job of learning all the stuff I need to know to understand how the changes work and why it is better (lot of memory saving options involved I think) and then I need to continue pushing through with my GUI design (for those of you waiting for it I should be pushing it out for play end of this week maybe). I just wanted to share this here as a public thanks for +Sean Chitwood who is “Dark Mane”. A thankyou for making the code better and also a thankyou for showing me that I have a lot left to learn. I have been sitting a little on my hands with my programming because I thought I was good, and I am glad to say that I have a lot left to learn. Challenge accepted! Keep rolling everyone.