Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main

Only five more months until we can binge watch season five of Robotics, and each year I think about this a little differently and a little earlier.

The Campaign Boards from a couple years ago

This year I'm trying to figure out how to make it easier easy. Well, easy-ish.  See, here's the thing, bad software is both difficult and ugly.  It's ugly because it's difficult, and the difficult makes it ugly.  A tautological knot to be sure, but write some pretty python code and it should make a lot more sense.

Anyway, a lot of stuff doesn't bug me, but ugly software freaks me right out.  (wow, that feels good to confess).

I've often said that the two hallmarks of a competent engineer are enough arrogance to think you can do something no one else ever has, and enough paranoia to disbelieve it works until it's retired and all the copies are destroyed.

Good software helps both facilitate the arrogance and ease the paranoia, and what's hard about making software is nurturing the underlying brainwork before writing anything.  The yeast has to rise, the meal has to digest, the egg has to be incubated, pick a metaphor that works for you.  It's always tempting just to start hammering out code without thinking of how the logic and data flows intertwine, but that's the surest way to make ugly essays and ugly software too.

Meth lab in a monkey-house ugly.

Don't get me wrong, the complicated fiddly bits are always complicated and fiddly, but they're basically parlor tricks - after a while there's a sameness to them.  Think Gandalf making fireworks.  (In my defense, I did say great arrogance is essential).

The upshot is that in two or three weeks, I'm going to be pinging some people (some of whom aren't reading this so don't know that it's coming - bwahahaha!) for some help planning and divying up the work so we have the robotics code we want by the start of August.

Like I said in an earlier post, it is not possible to teach 7th graders enough coding so they have a fully functioning (or partially functioning) 'bot by the first competition. 

Given that, here's a preview of what I think we ought to hammer out in the off season.
1) set up a rudimentary API for autonomous mode
2) create classes and objects that support the minimum possible amount of software we need.  Fellow engineer Brad once stated the best comment he ever read was "I'm sorry I ran out of time to make this shorter" and that, my good people, is the pithy soul of wisdom.
3) get something in place to support vision recognition.
4) formulate some sort of training plan for our freshly minted software team members.

There are a couple more things, but I want to spend some time with my head tilted back, letting the frontal lobes run a little lean[1], and contemplate the order of battle a little longer before commenting.  Good ideas, like good digestion, cannot be rushed.

 And since I've been thinking of re-watching Ken Burns' Civil War series, here's a Korean version of "Marching Through Georgia" (a line from the original is this post's title) to close things out.

[1] gratuitous reference to Henry Mulligan of the Mad Scientists' Club (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Scientists%27_Club)