Welcome

Welcome to Software! Whether you’re a weird build person looking at our guide, or you’re a lonely introvert who is channelling your terminally online habits into something mildly productive, hopefully you find the guides in this wiki of use.

There are a few things which are important to understand about software which aren’t true of other parts of robotics.

First of all, you can’t just “be part of software” and have an 80/20 split with software. Software needs to be at least 50% of your time commitment, since chances are, you’re not at robotics daily. This means that if you’re devoting your time across different things, we can’t necessarily track you down for whatever you were working on.

This is especially problematic if for some God forsaken reason you don’t put your code on GitHub. If you don’t do that, we can’t progress on whatever you were working on without you. While the rest of us could just do it ourselves, I think you can see why that’s stupid.

I (Haadi) have been part of Software for roughly 3 years now, and I’m still active in other parts of the team. But when push comes to shove, I’m focusing on software primarily, and everyone else in softare should be the same.

Second of all, if you’re on software you simply are not allowed to be toxic. I mean it. A large part of our job is rapidly reacting and adapting to new changes from build, or debugging troublesome code, and a toxic attitude only bogs us down. You have to have a control on your emotions, because the main thing driving us as a software division is cooperation.

Third, you MUST write clean code. If you’d like to see what I mean, this page is devoted to clean code. Writing clean code is essential to our collaboration, and makes your debugging process a lot faster.

Finally, don’t become a genius lone coder. Cool, you can make the entire robot code yourself. I can do that too, and anyone else who’s smart can do that too. The point of this is to work as a team, and enjoy the process. Part of this club is prepare you for real world experience, and if you’re actually doing software development in the future, you’ll make a lot more money and have a lot more respect if you’re not going at things by yourself.