Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Arduino Development and
Social Coding
Improve the world through sharing your code. Participating in a community of coders brings professionalism to your
hobby. The Arduino world is a community that values the free flow of knowledge and recognizes the benefit of the
community to problem solving.
While sharing code might seem to be an unsolvable puzzle at first, many tools have been used to accomplish the
task of code collaboration. In this chapter, you will learn to use the online code-sharing community called GitHub.
Along the way, this chapter will also explore how the Arduino open source community uses modern social-coding
practices to contribute to projects.
Social coding
is the idea that any code you create begins with and contributes to the work of a community of
coders and active users who want to assist you as well as to improve their own projects.
Arduino is a fast-changing platform, and its development and best practices are set not by industry standards
alone, but also by the emergent interaction between industry makers and an open source community of software
and hardware hackers. How you participate in the open source community demonstrates how you are a
professional
.
In the field of Arduino and open hardware,
pro
means using emergent techniques in social-coding communities,
alongside making and testing in open, entrepreneurial communities. Open hardware, like open source software, even
if created by a single person, is used and lives on in communities of use. So contribute your Arduino IDE source code
for the good of the world and move along.
Because Arduino is open source, it is always under revision by its community of developers. Your code can
undergo quite a bit change when starting a project, and when people begin to work collaboratively with you. The fast
pace of change in a project needs to be matched by fast updates to the documentation. You and your collaborators
will all need to have the same shared idea, and learn to describe that shared concept via documentation in a
collaborative wiki environment. Even if you work alone, documenting your process will enable you to quickly return
to projects once set aside, keep track of multiple projects at a time, or publish the software to run a kit you want to sell.
To document your project, you need to know how to create pages, and edit a project Wiki using the Markdown syntax.
This will be covered in the Documentation section of this chapter.
Components of Social Coding and Project Management
Project description, issue management, code version control, and documentation are the main components of social
coding and project management. We will dig into each one, including a description of what each is and how you
manage it through GitHub. Instead of these features all being hosted in different systems, they can all be found on
GitHub. Centralizing these features in one place helps your community of users and developers keep up to date with
the project and automatically watch for changes. The project repositories you host at GitHub can be created as public
or private repositories. You choose whether you are hosting a private project for a small team, or a public open source
project. On GitHub, you can host as many public open source repositories as you like, but you have to pay for the
ability to have a private project.
