READMEs are likely the single most overlooked component of a promising new open source repository. You could have the most amazing project the world has ever seen, but if you don’t leave a good first impression, it won’t be seen. In this article, we’ll look at some of the best practices when it comes to creating a README, and wrap up with a look at some great examples out in the wild. Following these tips in your own projects will help catch the attention of visitors and lead to more users and contributors.
The DO’s and DON’Ts
DO: Make your title short and memorable, but descriptive
In the world of open source development…
The obvious first question that arises is why? Why log your robot debug info to a USB drive instead of to the console or to the roboRIO? Well, as it turns out, there are many benefits to storing your logs on an easily removable drive which could make debugging problems at competitions significantly smoother for your team. In this article, I’ll be detailing the good, the bad and the ugly as it relates to this type of logging.
The Good
Custom Log Formats
When logging to the console, you have very little input as to how your data is logged. It comes out as a…
Our team loves to be in control of everything that happens on the robot, from basic code to the vision system running on our coprocessor. Being in control of everything in the vision pipeline removes a majority of the trust that you need to have in other peoples’ code working reliably, while also teaching the team a lot about a vast range of topics. This desire for control is one of the primary reasons we’ve repeatedly decided not to get a Limelight. No ability to SSH in and poke around and no open source repository of the code running on…
I’ve always loved programming, and doing it socially on GitHub makes things even better. Although I was already a member of several small organizations, such as GitPoint, ChaosTheBot and my local FIRST Robotics Team, this is my first experience working with a really large organizations — in my case, coala. It’s an amazing experience, so I’m incredibly grateful to Google Code-In for the opportunity.
Working with everyone at coala has been fantastic. Not only have I been introduced to a wonderful and powerful code linter (which I’ve already started to implement into my existing code bases), I’ve also learned a…
Andrew Dassonville
Full-stack web developer and programmer on the South Eugene Robotics Team
