The first sprint of Acebook — Off the Rails 2nd-4th July
Monday 2nd July
We arrived and went through the aims of the two weeks — discussing Acebook — where to find the relevant resources and then were allocated teams. Our group is Simone, Matt, Nick, Diego and myself (Lucia). We then spent the morning arranging and setting up our project. We watched a quick YouTube tutorial on the basics of Rails — skimmed over the project setup that was provided and made sure we were ready in terms of Trello boards, Git Repos and Slack channels etc. Essentials of starting a group project!
We looked through the tickets that were in the Trello board and decided to split into a pair and a group of three for the first afternoon of pairing. Posts had largely been set up already and just needed some features added, whereas Users hadn’t been started on yet and we decided they were the highest priority. We didn’t want to overlap at all and so Simone and Nick worked on the Users — whilst Matt, Diego and I worked on adding features to posts. By the end of the first afternoon we had implemented the following:
Users:
- Database table for users in which:
- User must supply name, email, password and password verification
- Name and email are maximum 50 characters
- Password length is a maximum of 6 characters
- No email duplication
- Automatically downcases all email addresses
Posts:
- Posts are written in a text area so that you can have multiple lines
- Time created is included in the posts table in the database — we used the Timecop gem to test
- Posts appear in reverse chronological order
The first day was productive and I personally felt that the team atmosphere was positive and as a result I came away feeling really positive about the progress we would make in the next two weeks.
Tuesday 3rd July
We had a stand up at the start of the day to decide on the days targets, and discuss what each pair had learnt the day before so we could all bring one another up to speed. We chatted about devise after having read an article about it — and we decided we would try and use built in Active Record validations, perhaps using devise for another project once we felt more comfortable using Rails.
As a group we decided it would be helpful to read up about rails routing — some had already done so — but this was something we would all aim to do throughout the course of the week. The morning started well, in the same small group/pair as the previous day whilst Simone and Nick finished implementing the Sign Up for Users. All that was left in this was to check the User validation form for User Signup.
In the meantime, Matt, Diego and I worked on implementing test coverage, rubocop, and Heroku. We struggled with Heroku, which after consulting with the coaches we found to stem from the fact we were working in a branch and we didn’t actually have a ‘homepage’ — it was a little draining to find that something we’d toiled over for at least an hour and a half we were able to resolve so simply — but I suppose a good thing that we weren’t caught up in too many errors!
In the afternoon, Simone and I paired, working on User Log in and Log Out — we were able to do this completely (with a few tests that we were aware were missing) by the end of the afternoon. Meanwhile, Nick, Diego and Matt worked on getting a pretty Navigation menu up and running, as well as continuous deployment (not quite fully working but almost). There wasn’t time for a standup as the majority of the team were heading for Bowles down the road in Finsbury Square — with the football afterwards.
Wednesday 4th July
A slow start this morning after a England win in the football against Colombia last night. We worked all day in the same groups and found we started to come up against various blocks. Simone and I really struggled with testing the controllers — as well as the views — and in the end settled for further feature tests for Log in and Log out, as well as unit tests. We felt quite drained after struggling so long with the tests — and the general atmosphere was definitely one of exhaustion/hangover.