Author: Alexander Maxwell

Within our project, choosing what technologies to use was the most difficult aspect of it. At first we wanted to use Unity, however, the learning curve of using that application would have taken our team an indeterminate amount of time to learn, which means we would have spent more time messing around in the engine instead of getting anything done.

The switch to JS and JS based applications has been dramatically useful in the creation of the app. Because of how fundamentally simple the app components are before they are expanded on, they are easy to implement as a foundation. While our lead dev is extremely experiences in JS so that means the team is able to have more auxiliary roles and support the code base.

One thing that I have learned by working in teams is that everyone has their own strengths and weakness. Leadership is the most important thing to a team, and can make a team of okay engineers really shine if there is someone who can help manage everything. Overall our leadership has been great and really helped to create a dynamic and fluid experience.

The overall project has been very successful. Our overall scope may not be as grand as other teams, but we are humble developer looking to make something that we can be proud of. Being in a team with everyone member taking above 15 credits mean that its very hard to manage time, but we have managed to do good so far, so I’m hoping that we can follow the temp in the upcoming semester, so that we can all graduate in the Summer and Fall.

The nice things abous JS is that the fact it was so awful, the entire CS community is trying to make it good. From this we have an absolute bounty of JS libraries that try and make the programming language good. Unfortunately, there is no cure for terminal awfulness, however, the libraries make the hospice care a little less painful.

After deciding that we can not invest 80 hours a week trying to become unity devs, it turns out using JS libraries was in fact the correct solution to our problems. We found one called SOCKET.IO which handles online multiplayer capabilities for games. Which is very convenient as trying to reinvent the wheel by deal with low level socket engineering is only slightly below the pain of trying to pull out your own teeth with pliers.

To say that I appreciate JS is being to nice to it. However, I admire its ability to be the programming language that is used for everything that is is not meant to be used for. It makes me really appreciate the countless of hours that was dedicated to make JS good in order to make it functional. Because for some reason we have collectively decided that this is our chosen messiah of programming languages even if its missing a couple limbs.

So far we are making good progress, even with the switch of tech. We made the right call by switching off of Unity and going to a simplified tech stack of using Node JS, HTML, CSS, and JS, and an assortment of JS libraries.

Our team is about to start on production, and it wasn’t a bad idea to start to learn how to write code that doesn’t suck. Our code is horrible, most of the time, but that’s okay, because now we know why its bad and how we can fix it.

A medium article by Christiaan Verwijs goes over why our code is bad, its simple, its code smells. In essence it talks about bad practices in code that can lead to long time problems. It outlines some common problems that we will be addressing in our code base.

First we will make sure that our code will not have a God Class, or a class that does everything. It should be separated up into chucks and have a specific purpose in mid. Next we are going to make classes suck less by making sure that we clear out all of the nested statements and make it clean with added functions.

However to make sure we can fix code smells we make sure to to really analyze our code to make sure that classes are serving their purposes, code is sorted into functions and that we need to prepared for the fact most code smells start from the begging of the project rather from the end of it.

Another article by Codacy goes over how to make your code more clean. Some practices that my team are going to be encouraged to use include making sure that numbers are constants, follow pre determined naming conventions to make sure that the function is clear in it purpose along with coding conventions that insure only enough information is given in comments to prevent clutter.

In short we are going to try and make our code readable so that in the short amount of time we have on our project it is going to be as clean and as manageable as possible so that we don’t have to worry about technical debt in a project that will be only roughly 9 months of total work from start to finish.

Sources:

https://medium.com/the-liberators/on-technical-debt-and-code-smells-ae8de66f0f8b

https://blog.codacy.com/what-is-clean-code

The more that I participate in this course the more I question why is it that so many other courses must be so time consuming, difficult, and poorly managed. I love this course. It gives us freedom to be software engineers and it allows us to express ourselves. The deadlines might be a bit stiff sometimes, but we usually get extensions.

Our project is going great I think? We are starting to create the first unity test, and unfortunately a lot of the team is out for the holidays and only coming back Sunday, giving us a huge crunch on the assignments. But progress is still being made, and we are marching forward.

Learning Unity is hard. It makes you learn new software while learning a new language. Luckily, coding for unity tends to to be as difficult as solving abstract problems using the power of 10 year old posts on stack exchange. They are more piratical, yet requires a lot of knowledge on how to use the tools we have as programmers in order to do good at our job.

I have great new about my job prospects. Around the time I graduate in the summer, IT positioning are opening up at the job I am currently working at, meaning that I have a solid chance of being able to switch departments and pay off my debt quickly.

Unity has a hard learning curve to it. I really plan to dig into over winter break, but right now it feels so overwhelming when I have to write an RESTful api for another class final project. It doable, but at least friends make the stress go away.

My teams future is promising and we are all in here together. We all have hope and ready to get the bag.

Man has it been a semester. I’m trying my best to graduate in the summer but school has been a meat grinder. Luckily this class isn’t the meat grinder, its a fun vacation almost. I nice creative pursuit where I can relax and do something fun while not needing to think about RESTFUL api.

So far my team has been incredible. We are well organized, are communication is a lot better than it use to, and we are getting a lot of progress done. Our biggest struggle at first was trying to get a vision for this project. I was the only one with any actual experience with Board Games, and we kinda sorta didn’t have any direction from the TA’s due to a clerical error. So It wasn’t until that we really got the ball rolling.

This course is going well. The classes are well structured and I feel like we have plenty of breathing room. I’m glad it so hand off and we really get to express our creativity. One thing though I would like to know if coming into this we are actually prepared or if we have to start grinding research just so that we can get our project done on time.

We have started to learn a bunch of new tech to help us along, from unity and its plug ins, to how to host servers, we are researching a large amount of tools and platforms so that we are able to make our project successful. It feels like every second we put into it we need to do even more than what we thought but I’m here for the journey.

We are using everything from C++ and C# to get our coding done, vscode for a coding space, and github to store everything. Discord is our flagship communication network, and we are getting stuff done in record time. I have good hopes for the future.

I’m Alex Maxwell, a senior at OSU. I have traveled the seas of self learning C for Linux to pass a class, to learning python, and tutoring others in C++. I am excited to finish out this year and start my life as a IT and cybersecurity specialist.

I live in Southern Oregon, near Roseburg. So that means I’m on PST. Hopefully I get lucky and within a couple of days I here from housing that some spots have opened up and that I can move onto campus. Fingers crossed after all.

I have a little cat named Mitten. She’s old and a trouble maker, but she is warm and we still love her. I am a huge trading card fan. I mostly play MTG with my favorite formats being Commander and Modern. I also play a lot of YuGiOh on Master Duel, and I have dabbled just a little bit in Pokemon. I am still waiting on for Force of Will to return for being part of the big 4.

Right now my favorite games are Warframe, Dwarf Fortress, and Total War: Warhammer. I play a lot less online FPS games now, but I still occasionally like to play Escape From Tarkov.

One of my biggest passions in life is cooking. I live to cook. I like the skill involved, I like how I can taste my improvement, and I like how it makes every meal I have be a delicious treat. My favorite think to cook is any sort of pasta that requires a sauce that takes a day to make. It always ends up so tasty.

I have always grew up with computers. My first experience was playing an old Korean mmo with my family when I was 7. It was called Atlantica Online. From there it kinda of grew. In high school I got super interested in IT and cybersecurity through watching YouTube so my passion grew out from there.

I currently work at my local community college as a tutor of math and writing. Its always so rewarding to see my clients grow and improve as the semester goes on, plus it gives me extra time to do homework while away from home.

Some of my favorite technologies include Visual Studio and WSL, cloud computing services and even some AI. I’m not to invested in these services, but at the end of the day they help get my job done.

My favorite listed project is creating the online TCG. I have a huge passion for trading card games, and I would love to have the chance to be part of a team that could work on one. I feel like my experience with card games could provide a lot to the table to help out the design of the project, while my experience in understanding how to find information to build projects will help the investigation stage of finding out how to do the project will make everything go smoothly.

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