There are some things that a project/group should not do and ways they should not be handled. The biggest thing is including threats among poorly written emails. If there is someone that I cannot and will not stand for in a project is having a leader who does not know how to properly open up lines for good communication between him/her and his/her fellow developers.

(The emails can be found here.)

Getting unexpected emails is a normal thing these days. Most email that I do not recognize goes immediately into the trash, because I do not have the time to figure them out. I trashed three emails from this website, and trashed them when I saw the contents was not written well. I knew that this was not an official message but a message that was sent to me by another person.

I log in and see that I have three messages, all sent in the same minute by the same person. The first email made little sense, but I could bare it. On to the second; it told me to “check the files” - what files? Following this, in all capitals (cruise control, for the Internet, or some such), was a threat that if I hack his/her computer I’ll go to jail. The third email was telling me that he/she was sending me the files. I believe those were out of order. Supposing I could give the benefit of the doubt, one could have arrived faster than the other.

“trust me you need those things and if you try to hack my computer i will sew you

don’t try any thing funny or your out of the group and put in to jail”

That came to me as part of a fourth email, and it gave me a little chuckle. If I hack his/her computer, they are going to come at me with thread and a needle, and then I’d be out of the group and put into jail. That made very little sense to me, but I do know what they were attempting to say.

To make any sense of the situation, I had to go to the group’s modDB page and figure out what the project was that I was supposedly getting files for, only to find that it’s an attempt at competing with a very well established mod that I happen to enjoy (Garrys Mod. Their name was, not surprising, “Build Mod”, or “bmod”). Having a group that was silent suddenly barage me with obtuse emails that had no substance at all was rather surprising, and frankly, a bit annoying.

If they had written one substantial email instead of sending five, I might have been more inclined to take any time to help work with them, since I did join their group, after all. If they had more information regarding the project that they were demanding I work on, I might have budged.

In any case, I took the liberty to remove myself from their group and remove all messages on my personal modDB profile.

There are times when you become so good at what you do and seem to work expertly and flawlessly with your team that you decide to go lax on certain aspects of your project management, like keeping individual changelogs and major update changelogs. Perhaps you’ve gone months without ever touching one of those and have done fine.

And then something goes wrong.

What do you do then? Well, for starters you have to contact everyone and see if they can recall exactly everything they had change within the last three or however many days it’s been since you started noticing the problem(s). Seeing as memories can become fuzzy as time goes by, this is not always the best way to keep track of recent changes.

This can lead to hours of frustration as well as headaches from hair pulling as you try to discern just _what_, out of all the changes, caused the error. It becomes especially tough when it comes to code.

Where is this all coming from? During the last few days working on my pet project I, with the rest of the core dev team, have made some extensive changes to the way the game plays. With this came a nagging error that would have most likely gone unnoticed had we not upgraded our server earlier. This upgrade had virtually eliminated all lag (we run extensive scripts which utilize precious processor cycles). We had been noticing seemingly random bits of lag every now and then and didn’t think much of it until tonight.

The three of us were quick to remember what we had changed, and thankfully we keep incremental backups. After muddling around with our changes, we decided to take the “solid changes” (changes that we are sure did not cause the problem) and export them so that we may import them into an earlier build. During this, our Resident Coder found some script flaws that may have been the culprit of said lag.

What does this teach us? Even those who have been working on a project for over five years still make mistakes, and becoming idle in keeping changelogs will throw a wrench in the inner workings of even the most smooth running systems. We have all agreed that we’re going to get into the habit of keeping changelogs again. Let’s just see how long that lasts.