Project – Processes and Insights

The transition to CVS is almost complete (two releases remaining to be put into the repository). While it would have been far simpler just to throw to whole project into CVS as is, I wanted the complete history for each release in the CVS repository as if CVS had been used from the beginning. So this would be a good time to give some insight into the development process of this project.


Most days there is only an hour or two to work of this project either on the code or write blog entries, more on the weekends, sometimes less depending on the demands of my full time paying job and my family. The is an attempt to post at least once a day on what is being worked on or on the design of upcoming components, but some days the code is being worked on and there is no time left to write and proofread a post. Sometimes several entries are written at a time (because there is too much for one post), but wait to post each entry to give some time to work on the code.

The design is ongoing, and is actually being worked on ahead of what is being worked on in the actual code. A lot of notes were made on the design almost six months prior to the first post last December, when the decision was made to actually write code and document the effort in a blog. Many of these notes (like on the Recreator design) have yet to be put to code. It is very helpful to explain the design and the reasons behind decisions in the posts. Many problems are identified during this process. The design notes for future components continue to be made (now in a bound notebook instead of loose pieces of paper).

The parallel development (code and future design) process is the reason why there are few major changes to what has been developed so far. This will be become even more evident when commands are implemented in the Translator. Thought needs to be given to how the command will be executed at run-time, the format of the command when it is encoded into the internal code, and what is needed to recreate the source code from the internal code for editing. Now back to the CVS transition and on to data type handling...