Coder qualifications

[feyeleanor]

Everything you're talking about doing requires more people's time. Developers' time.

Right now, you know how many developers there are actively doing stuff?

Me.

And I have a real job, and a wife, and at least the rudiments of a social life.

Yes, I would love to be able to say, "Here! Here is the brand-new mobile BattleMaster site, guaranteed to be at least 5000% better than before! Here is a brand-new island to move the people from our X deleted islands to, to get everyone interested in exploring again! Here are the 30 most-needed new features and big changes to make the game in general more fun to play, so everyone playing is more likely to stay, new or not!"

But as much as I honestly enjoy working on BattleMaster development, and do devote a lot of spare time to it, for me to do all that stuff by myself, at the current rates, would take at least a year or two.

I've often considered signing up for the dev team but juggling family and work has always made getting involved seem impractical. However if things are really at the point where ongoing dev work is hanging by a thread then I'd be willing to pitch in and help if you don't mind a PHP newb poking around in the codebase.

[egamma]

I've often considered signing up for the dev team but juggling family and work has always made getting involved seem impractical. However if things are really at the point where ongoing dev work is hanging by a thread then I'd be willing to pitch in and help if you don't mind a PHP newb poking around in the codebase.

send an email to tom (@lemuria.org) with your experience. I think you need Doctrine experience to work on the main game code, but if you take a look at the bugtracker, there's probably something there you could fix. Bugs are piling up, Doctrine conversion is basically stalled.

[Anaris]

PHP and Doctrine experience are preferred.

However, though Tom may disagree with me (and, of course, he has the last word), I would personally say that all that should be required is solid programming skill, a willingness to learn (carrying with it a willingness to be, essentially, on probation for the first few months), and a good attitude about the whole thing.

When I started as a dev, I'd never touched a line of PHP. I learned it on the job, and I am fully confident that others could do the same, provided they have a good foundation.

It's not like we're oversupplied with PHP/Doctrine gurus volunteering, after all :P

[Naidraug]

PHP and Doctrine experience are preferred.

However, though Tom may disagree with me (and, of course, he has the last word), I would personally say that all that should be required is solid programming skill, a willingness to learn (carrying with it a willingness to be, essentially, on probation for the first few months), and a good attitude about the whole thing.

When I started as a dev, I'd never touched a line of PHP. I learned it on the job, and I am fully confident that others could do the same, provided they have a good foundation.

It's not like we're oversupplied with PHP/Doctrine gurus volunteering, after all :P

Hey if we are allowed to learn PHP/Doctrine on the job, I think I can sign up to help too. And wouldn't mind beeing on probation for a few months.

I´ll send Tom an email about it.

[Tom]

PHP and Doctrine experience are preferred.

However, though Tom may disagree with me

I do. Past experience has shown that bringing new people up to speed takes a considerable amount of time and effort from the existing dev people. It is an investment. And Tim, you are the rare exception where the investment has paid back massively. You and I both remember quite a few cases where we invested the time and the volunteers just vanished on us. And, before anyone jumps up saying "I would never do that" - all of them said the same thing.

[egamma]

What if you just gave feyeleanor a few of the "manual/text" bug code snippets, let him work on them, and submit them back for review? Start with those, since they are presumably the easiest.

[Watly]

I am willing to help as well, but have very little experience with programming. I am not going to beg for training, but will try to learn it on my own.

What I can offer is a mathematical head and an eye for detail combined with an insane amount of free time, though I doubt that is necessary at this point.

[Tom]

What if you just gave feyeleanor a few of the "manual/text" bug code snippets, let him work on them, and submit them back for review? Start with those, since they are presumably the easiest.

It's not a question of how to do it. No matter how, you still need someone to explain things, review things, work with him, answer questions, bring him up to speed. And that's no matter who it is. The problem is that we don't have the resources for that, if it is not guaranteed that there will be return on investment. And it isn't, no one can guarantee that he won't give up or lose interest.

Back when we had 3 coders, that wasn't as much as an issue. And as enthusiastic as Tim is, I do try to make sure he's not burnt out.

[Tom]

However... maybe, just maybe... if we can get a small team, let's say 3 people, who are willing to support each other and learn on their own, we could tackle that newspaper system I talked about as a standalone project. It would give everyone enough experience with PHP and Doctrine to make the jump into the BM code a lot easier.

[Anaris]

However... maybe, just maybe... if we can get a small team, let's say 3 people, who are willing to support each other and learn on their own, we could tackle that newspaper system I talked about as a standalone project. It would give everyone enough experience with PHP and Doctrine to make the jump into the BM code a lot easier.

For the love of Cthulhu, Tom, if we had 3 people like that, I could use the crap out of them just fixing the damn bugs that have been accreting lately.

Seriously, I'm not going to get burned out helping a small team learn the ropes and easing them into bugfixing. Heck, even less so than a single person, most likely, because I can tell them all the same thing at once and get 3 times the return out of it.

What is more likely to burn me out is continuing to work alone on this forever, trying desperately to both move the game forward and tackle the rising tide of bugs by myself.

Bugfixing is so useful for getting new devs—even those new to PHP and Doctrine—up to speed. I can point them at general areas of code, describe the gist of how things are supposed to work, and review diffs without much trouble. True, for the first few bugs, I'd probably be spending as much effort guiding the newbies as I would fixing them myself. But that effort quickly starts to pay itself back as they are able to fix more bugs on their own.

The big key features, though, are "self-motivated" and "good at learning on the fly." And those are things that, so far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way to test for except to try it out and see.

[Anaris]

...and I really think you're way, way too hung up on the idea of writing a newspaper interface from scratch. I am 95% convinced that the Wikilog extension and a little bit of Wiki-fu will do everything we want on that front.

[Swiftblade]

If you are willing to take people with no coding experience and show them the ropes then I will put my hand up, as I have basic knowledge of PHP (done some bug fixing and making code fit) and have had quite a lot of experience with HTML and CSS. I have never worked with Doctrine, reading up on it now, and I have never made a full project out of PHP on my own, but I have altered and fixed other peoples code basically, and I know how databases work and what not. I also have computer technician and troubleshooting experience, experience running support services and I have run and configured quite a few forums/blogs/basic websites for people.

I have to use reference sheets quite a bit, because I don't often remember exact syntax right away, but after doing it for a while its usually in there for good. I would love to try out for this probation type deal, fix some bugs etc, and with some guidance I may be able to get up to scratch and start pulling my weight.

Let me know what I need to do to get in on this and I'll give it a shot.

[Vita`]

If I could sync my changes to the repository, the following bugs/small features would be fixed for the next update and I would probably feel a bit more motivated to fix a bunch more on my list.

• Duchy messaging sending to correct recipients
• Replying to duchy messaging working again
• Buy Region link displaying on Actions page when it should
• Lords of Duchy referendum working again
• Displaying respective guild balances for MyGuilds table
• Stripped backslashes from duchy names
• 
  
  • Various gender text fixes
  • No double first name of rebellion leader in rebellion announcement

[Tom]

...and I really think you're way, way too hung up on the idea of writing a newspaper interface from scratch. I am 95% convinced that the Wikilog extension and a little bit of Wiki-fu will do everything we want on that front.

It still requires people to learn the wiki syntax and fiddle around with templates that break your entire page if you forget one } anywhere. That is the problem. I'm sure that technically you can coerce MediaWiki into doing what we need, but it will never be beautiful nor easy to use.

BM really could use some parts that are 21st century. Visual appeal is what draws people in. The newspapers could be something really cool to make new players interested. If you implement something from scratch, you can do magic like this:

   
• http://isotope.metafizzy.co/
• http://mcpants.github.io/jquery.shapeshift/
• http://gridster.net/

Try out these demos and then tell me you wouldn't take those any day over fiddling with {{Usr|Tom}}}}|author = {{Usr|Indirik}}}}{{TattleLeft|date = May  21, 2010|title = Server Status.



You and I are coders, Tim. We don't mind the wiki syntax, but you'll have to agree that with complex templating, it is sometimes a bit confusing even to us. Now imagine the 95% of players who are NOT coders.
I am trying to get the barrier-to-entry down, so more people can participate in newspapers, that's all. People desire the local forums, mostly because they are EASY places to exchange stuff. But they are OOC as hell. A newspaper could be made an in-game item. And yes, they would be propaganda rags. That would be the whole beauty: If your enemy publishes one, you can't reply (not a forum) - but you can start your own.

[egamma]

Well, so far we have 4:
Swiftblade
Watly
Naidraug
feyeleanor

Let's get them working on something! I can start monitoring the bugtracker again if needed, although it would help if I could actually change the status, instead of just the resolution.