My experience as a first-year programmer
8 May 2020 , 21:29 by Laurens | in Member Hightlight
Last season was my first season with FTC. I had already heard a little about it through some friends, but when I became programmer for Team SPACE I still didn’t know what I was getting into. The first few weeks took to a bit getting used to, mostly because I’ve never really worked with a group like this. I previously only worked alone on some programming projects, but in that time I never programmed anything similar to a robot.As a new member I still had a lot of questions. I worked a bit on the hardware, so even though I had to learn a bit more than I expected, it gave my an advantage with combining both the hardware and the software parts of the robot. I thought programming a robot would be hard, but because you already get this huge basis to work with, you can quickly get some motors running.
Of course there also were some problems. Because I never ‘really’ worked together with people (of course I work together for school projects, but never for like a hobby), I had some trouble asking for help. This sounds kind of dumb, but I always fixed programming problems alone, so I never had to ask for help. Thankfully, I got over this problem pretty fast, and working together is going great.
Now that we have reached the end of the season, and I gained a lot of experience, I want to help out the newer programmers/teams. We’re currently developing a basis so that it’ll be even easier to program the robot, and because of this teams can start out faster. I had a great time during this season, and I can’t wait to start the next one!
