Striving for Perfection

So it was a fairly productive day. The Connect Four Project as officially started and at this point I can create a the board of yellow plastic. As from before I have the image files for the checkers and for now that is all I will do for graphics. For this week my goal is just to get the basic game play for two human players taking turns and able to recognize when the game is won, or board full and thus a stalemate.

Today's dilemma of programming came from trying to do everything "correctly" right now. For example, I am reusing a the code I put together during the tutorials as a base, but I made fresh copies to edit instead of true code reuse. But I have decided to go a little further with the smaller projects before I start building a library of reusable objects. It is recommended that you design anything "new" for the project at hand with out worrying too much about reuse. You should still use good coding style and practices, but wait till after the project is done to determine which objects are good candidates for reuse and then redesign those objects as their own mini-projects between software projects.

Rest of the day was spent tooling around with more features of SourceForge. I started the Wiki documentation and created a few project milestones for the next few weeks as well as putting a line in the sand for the main project itself. The first key milestone is the formulation of the design document itself by my 40th birthday. Although "development" has really started with all the exercises I am doing now, this will be a formal document. And thus by my 40th Birthday the project will be underway in earnest. Proposed dates and milestones should be in place by then as well.