World of Goo is an awesome game that is simple yet challanging. It works on Linux/Mac/Windows and for now, you can get it for whatever you feel like paying? I strongly suggest you through a few dollars their way and not only help developers that create cross platform games, but also have a great time playing it. Another good thing is that no DRM is used at all. They are actually trusting their customers, so show some support. www.worldofgoo.com
Yes yes, I know I’m posting this a day late. I ended up getting caught up in an intense game of Wesnoth. The conference was great today, even though I wasn’t able to see as many of the presentations as I would have liked. That was because my presentation for pfSense happened yesterday and I had to spend a good portion of my time preparing for it. It went quite well, even though we couldn’t get a video presentation of it. The audio was able to be recorded and as soon as they process it, we’ll get it posted somewhere for everyone to be able to listen to.
Talk about busy. All of the presentations were great and Ignite was a nice way to unwind. If you’ve never been to an Ignite event, you really should go, or even speak at one. It is very fast paced and usually has quite a bit of humor. The keynote was excellent. On Friday (today, since I forgot to save this) I get to present about pfSense. I’m excited to see all of this happening. Anyways, off to the conference for another full day.
On my way down to the conference, I was traveling with some co-workers. Aaron, who does a lot of our networking stuff for clients decided that he would make a mobile hotspot out of the car. I was unsure of how well it would work, but I was interested, especially since I had a bunch of work that needed to get done and that required the internet.
He configured internet connection sharing on a windows laptop and connected that to a wifi router. This he set up with the standard settings, wpa encryption, and such. In no time we were on the net. We use Alltell for our mobile broadband and I was quite pleased with it. From Rexburg, Idaho to Sandy, Utah, we had a continuous connection. About half of the time we were going at only 12KBps, but the other half we were going 150+KBps. I was very happy about the performance, especially since my other cell provider was spotty.
First…
Documentation is vital! I’ve been working with a company doing design work and they wanted me to help them with some development. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to reuse much of their current codebase. It isn’t really that the code is bad, just that the code isn’t documented, and as a result, it will take a long time to figure out what exactly is going on. This is for a company that has been waiting many months to get this development done and now their current developer is having a hard time finishing since nothing is really well documented. I always tell people to document like they have a one day memory, and that usually does the trick.
Second…
Documentation is vital! The same developer from before doesn’t appear to have any documentation regarding the project, its scope, flow, time constraints, or quality required. I don’t care how good your memory is, please remember to document what it is you are trying to do and why the client has you doing it (at the very least.) Even better is to have mind maps made of the scope, and UML diagrams made of each use case, information flow, and program interaction with third party applications.
Finally…
Documentation is vital! Try to keep notes regarding what hangups you’ve had and what things have proven more difficult than were originally anticipated, and let your client know as soon as you know. This way the client is actually kept in the loop and doesn’t sit for months trying to figure out where their application is and what the hang up appears to be.
Sorry for all of the ranting, but there are a lot of good developers that could be great if they just understood why documentation is important.