At Ancestry.com, we have many developers whom contribute to open source projects. Today I want to talk about an open source project I have been involved in, along with one of my team members Shane Burke. As contributing to open source projects is not directly related to the day to day development work at Ancestry, it provides an opportunity to give back to the community and allows developers to think outside the box, as well as contribute to something they are passionate about. Both Shane and I work on this project in our spare time.
FooBar football is an opensource collectable card game (CCG) based upon football. It is inspired by Magic The Gathering, Football Manager, FIFA Ultimate team, Match Atax and a host of other games.
Over the next few months, I plan to write a series on what the game is and how it is being implemented. Here is a quick overview:
- GitHub used for version control
- AppHarbor used for hosting
- C# used for match engine development
- Angular JS used for client development
GitHub
For version control, we use GitHub. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers free accounts for open source projects. In our day-to-day environment Shane and I use Microsoft’s team foundation server for version control so contributing to this project has allowed us to learn something new.
You can check out the current state of the project on our GitHub page: