Well, only if you do it foolishly. But this is sometimes hard to avoid. When one gets super excited about coding, such as myself, one can start typing faster than their brain can think. This happened to us a few times. The problem wasn’t so much our code being messy, but the way in which the coding process happened. Here is how the common problem cycle developed:
1) Hardware would tell software about what the current design is.
2) Software, in their genius, would magnificently code it
3) Software would inform electrical what their needs are
4) Electrical does something.
5) Hardware informs software that the design has radically changed, and most of software’s code is now obsolete.
More monitors than programmers
Somewhere in there testing would occur. Normally, this shouldn’t cause too much of a headache, but communication between teenagers is never optimal. One of the three departments would eventually be living in a fantasy land, and cause the project to be halted because their stuff no longer works.
For software, the easiest defense against this is a reversion system, such as SVN or Git. In the beginning, I made the executive decision that this was unnecessary. We used Dropbox because we only need a common set of code across the computers at school. But then, literally in the middle of the night, the robot started to misbehave after a new feature was being implemented. The entire software team had been working on the same code, so we had no idea what the problem was. It caused high tensions.
Thankfully, out of necessity, I had a clean copy of code on my flashdrive, because I needed a convenient way of transferring the code to a computer that did not have internet. We used this as a template.
We then developed a primitive reversion system: anytime code was in a stable, template-able state, we placed it in “cold storage” either on the Dropbox, or for more major revisions, on my flashdrive. This way, if we ever need to go backwards, we could just use one of the previous copies.
I learned my lesson, and so did my entire department. After hours of debugging and figuring out what we were doing on the pratice bot, we finally got an autonomous that works!
