I Programmed Today

Despite having no homework, tests, or commitments outside of class, I've found it difficult to make time to write this semester. The type of thinking I do most days leaves me drained, and whatever energy I have left is typically zapped by my evening commute home.

At any rate, today was such a good day that I can't help but write a bit. I'm working on a project at the Virginia Ball Center, which has been a very rewarding project. I've had the chance to work with some quirky, brilliant people. As a group, we've been doing game design and internal play testing for the better part of two months. Game design uses a part of my brain that I find very taxing, but today was a bit different.

As our project moves away from game design and into software design and development, I get the chance to actually write software. I'm not resentful for things taking as long as they have; at any point, I could have said,"I don't feel like prototyping any more, I'll just write some code." But I feel that I have a good idea as to the creative direction that the game is going in. It wouldn't be fair to drop someone else into this role, I have too much momentum to do anything other than hashing out game mechanics,IMHO.

With most of the game designing done, I was able to focus some attention today on a programming task. I jumped into things via pair programming. I navigated, while a team member steered. We employed the builder pattern for the section of code we were working on, which I had not had the chance to work with yet. Today was also one of the first chances I've had to make use of some of the concepts within Clean Code, by Robert Martin. The Computer Science students within the team are reading through this book together, and we've all found it very informative.

Once our code was refactored and we determined that no code smells permeated the air, it was lunch time.  After some discussions around the dining room table and our respective meals, the Computer Science students involved with the project came together and put in some really solid collaborative work regarding use cases—something none of us were proficient with yet.

Overall, the project is beginning to really come into focus. The game is taking the shape of a game, and it's hard not to be excited! Throw some gorgeous leap-year day weather into the mix and it's easy to see why today was so great! I'm looking forward to the lessons I'll learn and the tools I'll pick up in the next two months.

Communicating and Google Reader

Using Google Reader has been an interesting, productive exercise for me over the last couple months. One of my professors mentioned it and I thought I would give it a whirl. It's an interesting tool, as it's relatively worthless out of the box. Start following a few people and subscribe to a few websites, however, and it transforms. Every day I wake up and several new items are in my new item list. Personally, I try to keep my feeds clear by at least reading a little bit of each post  (so they read 0 and not 1,251). If I don't find them interesting, I skip the post and mark it as read. There is always something that I can be reading to entertain and/or better my self, so to have that convenience in my pocket is an awesome thing...

I subscribed to an already existing set of feeds called Agile. There are several which Google have set up already, but this one deals with, well, Agile topics within software development. Some of it is a bit too self-serving for my tastes(people blogging about certifications and workshops, things that may matter to people other than myself). However, a few blogs that I've added to my subscription have been diamonds in the rough.

One post by Jeff Atwood really hit home with me. In his discussion on How to Write Without Writing, he gave me another reason to do what I'm doing in this blog. To summarize part of his post, he says that blogging is a great way to better one's communication skills. Atwood says that bettering these skills will make you a more proficient programmer. The more I work in groups and on teams, the more I realize that he's absolutely right. I've seen firsthand how difficult it is to come in months after someone wrote some code and try to piece their ill-formed thoughts together. Sometimes there just aren't enough clear comments. These are the kinds of things employers will be expecting, and it'll be one of the ways they'll love you if you're good at it...at least that's what I'm hoping.

This space has been all about that, taking ideas and putting them in their clearest form(at least to me). I'm definitely not the best writer or communicator, but this is my attempt to hone these skills. It's nice to know that someone like Atwood, with all of his experience behind him, is encouraging me to blog and collect my thoughts.

Atwood's blog can be found here, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/.

Another interesting blog I found is, http://bjk5.com/ by Ben Kamens. He's the lead dev at Khan Academy, which is deserving of its own post, but I'll save that for another time.

Using Google Reader has been a great experience. I don't have many followers, but I try to share with them only the things which I find truly interesting. There's almost a hierarchy of things which are worthy of being shared: a Google Chat status is the lowest, a Tweet would be next (if I had a Twitter account), a Facebook status after that, and finally a shared item on Reader.