Welcome to varcade_games Discussions!

[Code-Over-Time]

In this Q&A you will find hands-on tasks.

Before getting started you will need to create a new branch. So run the following command from your varcade_games directory

git checkout -b development v1.0.0

Once you run that you will be operating on a new branch called 'development'. This is where you will do your development.

What you are doing here is creating a branch from an existing tag. This tag is basically a snapshot of the codebase in a certain state. You will be working on your tasks against a more simplified (but less pretty) version of Varcade Games.

We need to do this because the main branch of Varcade Games will be continually evolving, but we want to have a consistent snapshot of the project to ensure that everyone who is doing the tasks is working against the same code.

So this development branch will be your main branch..

!!! info
An important note on this. When you switch to this branch, the code you have on your file system will change. However, you have already built and run the project locally. This means you will have a mismatch between the code and the running project. For details on how to tackle this, check out this Code Over Time blog post.

Workflow

I'd recommend following a pretty simple workflow:

1. Create a new branch for each task
2. Commit changes to that new branch
3. When the task is complete create a pull request on Github - Remember that this pull request will be against your fork on the Varcade Games repository
4. Review your changes and merge via the Github UI

Which looks something like this with Git:

# Current branch is development, created from v1.0.0 tag (see above). 
# Create a new branch with a name that represents the work, 
# like `task_junior_keyboard_login` 
git checkout -b task_junior_keyboard_login

# Make some changes to the code and commit
git commit -am "Add message about those changes"

# Always make sure to save your changes in the remote repo 
# (I've lost entire projects before)
git push origin task_junior_keyboard_login

# Make some more changes and commit
git commit -am "Add message about those changes"

# Always push
git push origin task_junior_keyboard_login

After that you can use Github to create your pull request.

Experience Level

Each task will have an associated experience level. This will give you an idea of how challenging the task will be, depending on how much experience you have working with Varcade Games.

The levels are:

• Junior
• Mid
• Senior
• Principle

Junior tasks tend to be small tweaks and bug fixes that are applied to isolated parts of the projects. For example changing some UI, or adding some additional logging to one of the server projects.

Mid tasks are for people that have a good working knowledge of all of the various projects within Varcade Games. These may involve updating multiple projects, for example adding a new field to the website database, updating an API to include this new field and finally updating the UI to display this new field to the user.

Senior tasks will usually include some sort of architectural considerations. For example, adding an entirely new feature to Varcade Games. This work will need deep thought and consideration about the far reaching consequences of the changes you are making.

Principle tasks are the most technical advanced tasks. These may include profiling and optimization work and will require deeper understanding of the underlying concepts and design of the various libraries and applications used to build Varcade Games.

Needless to say, you should complete all of the tasks at each level before proceeding to the next level.

!!! info
These levels mirror the titles you may expect to find in engineering organizations, and I have tried to set the content of the tasks according to what may be expected of engineers at each level.