As of yesterday, another programmer has joined the Fizzure project. This makes me very happy but at the same time, a little worried.
I am very happy about having another programmer to help me on this project for a bunch of reasons. It gives me someone to help me out when I am stuck on a bug. Someone to bounce my ideas off of and see what they think. Someone to do another portion of the programming. It is a huge help in a lot of ways.
However, at the same time, I am a little worried. I’ve never really worked with someone in a team on a large project before. I have to figure out the best way to keep code and things organized well between both people.
I am thinking of using Mercurial to help manage the code. Luckily, the project is easily split into 2 quite separate parts – the Server and the Client. I will be working on the server, and the other programmer will be working on the client. Both of us wanted to almost start over from a code perspective because what I had written was pretty messy. I think it was quite a good idea. I’ve looked at his basic re-design of the client, and it looks pretty good. We are hoping to implement a skinning system for the client so people can make the program look according to their own likes.
I was not happy with the way the server was organized before so I decided to completely redo the structure. The server is going to be a distributed system so that it will be handled by several computers instead of just overloading one. I’m trying to make it an easily scalable and efficient distributed system. We’ll see how it turns out.
I haven’t spent too much time working with the new addition to the team, but the time we have spent has been great. We discuss the best way to do the current thing that we are working on instead of just going right to the first idea that pops into our heads. This, in the end, I think will cause a much more efficient and well organized program. We’ll see how everything turns out.
