Software development gems

In this blog post, I list some gem-like web pages that are worth reading if you want to become a better software developer. They’re not simply some sites where you can read about the hype of the week, instead they include insightful material that actually makes you see software development from a whole different perspective.

The need for mentioning the following sites arises from the fact that most web sites and blogs I find in the net usually make me think the writer either tells me some basics about programming I learned years ago or tries to convince me to use some new, brilliant technology which usually involves XML and/or Java. I often get the feeling I’m not part of the target audience and look for things that do a better job on motivating me. As it is quite difficult to find such sites, I’ll spend the few minutes to list some of the sites I’ve found interesting.

Some time ago I stumbled upon a web site called Joel on Software. It’s basically a blog by an experienced software developer, with interesting stories about our industry for us all to read about. It was actually the first software related web page I had found in a long time that managed to inspire me. My favorite article is “Can your programming language do this?“. As another example, if you’ve ever wondered about the Hungarian notation – or cursed at the coding guidelines that force you to use it, even if you can’t see the usefulness behind it, go read what Joel has to say about its history and things may become more clear, although not necessarily less frustrating.

I was glad to find such a page and was hoping to find more. Later I stumbled upon the page of Paul Graham. He shares some similarities with Joel – they both have founded a start-up company and written a lot of nice texts about software development. As a programming language enthusiast, I especially find the essays by Paul Graham involving Lisp interesting.

Some days ago I was looking for a new book on software development to buy and came across Clean Code by Robert Martin. I haven’t bought the book – yet – but searched for some related material and stumbled upon a presentation by Robert Martin titled “What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too” as well as a blog post drawing parallels between the aforementioned languages and functional languages, namely Lisp and Haskell. The presentation seems very insightful and makes me not only want to learn more about the history of programming languages but also get a copy of the book.

Gaining interest on the new, modern software development techniques I read about TDD and BDD. And when you read about acronyms as these you can’t help coming across the webpage of Martin Fowler sooner or later. Here I also found an interesting text about DSLs, which I feel is an increasingly important – and interesting – topic.

Sites like these help me learn about the new developments in our industry and also make me a better, more efficient developer while still preserving the fun factor. Keep it up!

Freekick news: single player mode and first menu drafts

Time for a small update again. The last time I wrote I mostly reviewed the work done last year, wrote about the tools used and spent some time comparing Haskell with C++ as I had been busy rewriting the Freekick server in C++. So what’s been going on in the past month? Well, some of the points mentioned in “things to do next” part of the last post have been worked on, while others aren’t. Also, as I have now been using C++ for a few months there have been some signs of the need to wander off to another – hopefully better and shinier – programming language again, just like one would expect. This time I’m not thinking of Haskell though, but Python.

I’ll first let you know what’s new with Freekick core development. There’s been a lot of small improvements – I’ve added some server functionality such as allowing human players to play along or goal detection, but the most important update is that the OGRE client now has the ability to control a player and kick the ball around. This actually makes Freekick a soccer game that can be played. This doesn’t mean, however, that it would actually be fun to play the game – the relatively silly AI makes sure we’re not quite there yet. Another thing that makes the game less fun is that the clubs aren’t really there; the players have no differences in skills or personality, there are no kits or club names or tournaments.

The next thing for me to do is try and eliminate these two problems: first, the AI needs to be made better. At the moment it’s not really that bad – they pass the ball and try to score – but they only have a few actions which makes the match seem repetitive, and the goalkeepers are horrible. Second, the soccer match needs to have a menu around it, including creating and viewing tournaments, lineups, league tables – the whole deal. Actually I’ve already started work on that, which brings me to Python.

You see, working with C++ the whole time with Freekick core was not bad, but after you’ve seen something like Haskell in action, sooner or later you start to wonder if everything really needs to be so complicated. I’m talking about the sheer amount of time spent typing the code in, the loops, the iterators, the classes and headers and declarations, the curly brackets…

As Freekick was designed with modularity in mind and was split to multiple processes from the beginning on, the question of using Python for the game menu arose. After poking around with PyQt for a while the first drafts of the game menu were already finished. I had had my doubts about dynamic languages and duck typing before, but now, after having written a few small applications with Python I’m slowly starting to see the advantages such a dynamic high-level language can bring. I was amazed how fast you could actually write a simple-looking Python script that does the same thing as an application you could spend weeks writing in C++.

Encouraged by my Python adventures, I played around with the idea of solving the other problem – AI – with Python. Since I don’t really fancy writing all the Freekick client side logic in Python, I thought about using Boost.Python to export the C++ classes into Python. Doing the experiment was interesting, but the unfortunate truth is that exporting the classes still seems like too much work, even with the excellent library, especially with the page-long error messages and the fact that the STL containers would apparently also be have to exported manually. The other way would be embedding Python in C++, but I’d still have to export the data structures to Python and back, which makes me think it’s probably faster just to stick with C++ after all.

The GUI part is still far from ready – the only event that starts a match at the moment is a friendly match, and the GUI-match interface is non-existent at the moment – but the base is there and will be expanded when the time is ready. At the moment I think improving the soccer match itself is more important, since there is really no good reason to start a match if playing it isn’t fun, which brings me back to C++ and the AI. I’ve been reading the book “Programming Game AI by Example” by Mat Buckland again, which really is quite an inspiring work, but I think it will still take a while for me before the AI code is in a state where it both seems halfway smart and is easily extensible.

Luckily there are still a couple of mini projects for me to do in case writing AI gets boring. First of all there’s the GUI with all the tournament and schedule creation to do, but I think the time is also slowly getting ready for another Freekick client, this time with ncurses as the “graphics” library. I’ve been wanting to get my hands dirty with ncurses for a while now, and I’m all for minimalistic software, so hey, why not. Other fun things include creating a TV style soccer camera in OGRE and taking player skills into account on the server side. I’ll keep you posted.