After you do something for a while, you start to develop certain patterns to make it easier. What habits, good and bad, have you developed from Vex?
I always save whatever I’m working on every other word/line.
No matter what I’m building, I always pull out a bag of zipties and the wire snips. Also standoffs.
When I was new to Vex, I used to swing c-channels to see if they were steel or aluminum; the steel ones would pull much harder. I still do this even though I can tell the difference just by the weight now.
If you have both hands on the keyboard, using the mouse is a waste of time and it is most definitely faster to Alt+Tab your way around the computer. If you have a hand on the mouse, taking it off is a waste of time and it is most definitely faster to type with one hand. Under no circumstances should your hand go from the mouse to the keyboard or vice versa.
A habit more generally related to working in a shop environment that vex… when you cannot find a part/tool, that very moment you cannot find it, do two things: note where you looked first (so that you can forever store it there), then start putting things away until you find it. This process has both saved me great amounts of time and kept my work space orderly for a sadly large number of years.
As a builder, my best habits are designing things as simply as possible and also designing them so that they’re as easy as possible to take apart for when I inevitably have to redo everything to shift something just one square over. My worst habit is using a keps nut with anything but a bearing.
Back when I used to use RobotC…
I got in the habit of never clicking the ‘X’ in the top right until all open code was saved if I wanted it saved (by looking for asterisks in the tab bar thing). I may or may not have accidentally saved temporary code and not saved real code at the state championships through RobotC’s save-on-exit dialogues.
Updating about 3-4 weeks of meeting entries the night before comp. Going to bed at like 3 in the morning, taking a 3 hours power nap and going to a comp.
Writing a piece of code, deciding something about it could be improved or it could be written in a more easily understandable way. Then rewriting everything from the ground up.
Me the day before a major competition:
“Yes it works perfectly and has no issues since we have tuned and perfected it on this robot, but this rewritten piece uses 12b less variables!”
I’m stuck power cycling the robot before every match and readjusting the angle because during my first tournament we forgot the turn the robot on and then it took us another 30 seconds to get it to work.
