Ten Easy Steps To Become A Better Coding Team, Part 2:
6. Be honest, not cruel
Sometimes the pressure and tension gets really high, but you must keep your calm. Coding under pressure can be extremely dangerous, or it can be good in some cases. Know what your doing, do research, think carefully and try, doing that will usually serve you well. Though as with most things, take these liberally. Sometimes its good to relax and experiment, not during a project of course. You never know, one day somebody on your team might have a problem and because you tried out something new that one time, you know exactly what it is.
7. 3D's Of Development
Design, Develop, re-Do, well its not quite three, but thats not the point. The point is to think about what your doing before you do it, and when i say think I mean Document( the other D ). Though I may say re-Do jokingly, there are a significant amount of things that fall into the Iterative process. For example, in Ascension we are using many technologies, both simple and complex. Some of the systems that went through iterations were the cutscene camera, the audio system, and the animation system. Take note that iterations are not the end all, even things that went through iterations have bugs, even though thats one of the goals of working in iterations.
8. Bad Case Of The Maths
If it isn't entirely obvious, most things in the programming... anything really, is math heavy. Be it binary, 2D, 3D, etc, its stuff you just have to know to be an effective programmer. Dont get me wrong, math isn't everything, there are many other things that are important as well. The point of this point, is that its good to have somebody who knows they're Maths, but that always isn't possible, so you have to brush up sometimes. Math is just one of those things that if you're good at it, you're good at, and if your not, you have to try harder.
9. Full Time Chefs Wanted
As with everything, you have to know what your able to take on, know yourself. This is especially important to people in leadership positions. Once you know yourself you can get to know others. This specifically being assigning people to tasks, which should be considered on an individual level. Its good to know who and what your working with, just like a chef, a chef knows who he works with and what the tools and ingredients are. In this case, think of every programmer as a chef, if the chef knows what he needs to make, and knows the tools he has to go about doing it, he can get it done. This also goes along with the knowing yourself part, you don't tell a chef who only knows how to make Italian dishes to make Thai food. Just the same way you don't tell a programmer who's good at doing collision to do rendering, regardless of the fact that he might be good at math. Know your resources, and they will work well.
10. Crash (The motivation killer, not the movie)
Crashes are tough, theres no doubt about that. Theres not much to really say about this, but be careful. This can and depending on the team/person can cause motivation to drop. Theres a reason people like programmers with good debugging skills. As a matter of fact, we had a really bad one recently, and had a ton of trouble finding it( it was 'Memory Corruption' ). Those are the worst kind because they aren't an immediate thing, sometimes they just have to be experienced, so that you know better for later.
Coming up soon:
*FINAL*
Also a few posts that were never finished.
