CoolBasic Classic DevTeam is up!
Yeah! Over 2 months in the making, all necessary arrangements are finally done to bring the development team up and running. During this period I’ve been documenting, and documenting, and.. umm.. documenting some more. Less time coding, I know, but it’s better to have well thought-out plans before we start implementing anything. The biggest time-sink has been writing down most of my ideas for CoolBasic Classic so that every member of the DevTeam is aware of and understands them. For now, I think there’s about 200 pages of text if printed. The management has decided to let the newly selected members to have some time reading the important contents from the hidden forum and from the document storage before assigning the first tasks to everyone. We’ll be having our first welcome meeting soon, too. I was happy to see both technical and design-related discussion about various topics within the same evening I promoted the members. I look forward to have rich brainstorming for the few future-coming weeks, too.
I and the managers interviewed all applicants. These sessions were about 45 to 50 minutes long discussions where the candidates were tested against their applications, and their motivation, skills and suitability were evaluated. Those chosen, I believe have true interest in developing this remake of the current, oldish CoolBasic, called CoolBasic Classic. Generally speaking, all interviews were pulled off during one week. There were 4 to 7 interviews per day, and they took place after normal business hours. It was exhausting for me to tailor the questions and the frame for each interview separately (in addition to executing the actual interviews), but I think we did a very good job at it. Having chosen managers beforehand definitely helped, and I’ve had support from them in many aspects how to organize the team efficiently – among other things, we now have an SVN in the works.
Every member was promoted to the Dev forum group, and they now gain access to the hidden development forums. The devs can be recognized from their bright yellow name color. They also received a @coolbasic.com email address as well as the login credentials to the internal website wherein the document storage is found, too. Tech Developers also get a free PureBasic license for 12 months. We ended up to 12 members + management, and I feel that we have a good team that has expertise from various areas of IT. The reviewed organization chart looks like this:
Now that the launch is behind, I can continue my work on the CoolBasic Classic compiler. It’s top priority because we cannot really start with the CoolVES engine until we have some byte code to feed in. Soon there will be various other “projects” launching in parallel, including code editor, internal DevTeam web services and experimental code for CoolVES. In a nutshell, all team members (apart from music artists) should soon have something to work on. Also, we have code quality checks, regular development meetings and branching. Once the compiler is at a certain state, I’ll start writing its technical documentation (internal) along with a public byte code documentation for CoolVES. Yay, I so love documenting *cough*. Right now I’m working on function overload resolution and optional parameter fill-in. When that is completed, only statement-specific validators remain for Pass#2. And when Pass#2 is finished, it’s time to implement the actual byte code synthesis (at that point, I will start specifying its exact command set). The compiler is already lexing and parsing all language features.