Week 6: Projects aka reducing witchcraft from 100% to 40%
Project week 1: Build AirBnB. (Kind of.)
This week was all about team work, project planning and putting into practice the ability to dive into the unknown with minimal guidance and make a thing.
Theme this week was to always be ready, so if the client asked for a car, rather than giving them a wheel, then a hub cap, then some suspension etc, you would give them a roller blade, or a skateboard.
Within our group of four we took the opportunity to learn new technologies, a lot of them, oh my so many. Considering we had only spent a week previously on js we committed to a full js stack using:
Node, Express and RethinkDB. (testing provided by mocha/chai/zombie)
One hell of a way to put into practice our learning how to learn and getting comfortable with not knowing anything. Makers is really good at building your confidence in diving into the unknown, thrashing around for a bit and realising “OH THIS IS HOW IT WORKS”.
Advice with diving into new languages:
Do a few hello world tutorials and read up on some basic syntax, direct mapping of skills and behaviours/conventions can get you stuck in terms of thought processes. A lot of the code clashes this week were caused by mapping ruby style behaviour onto js, shockingly, with them being two very separate languages it didn’t work too smooth.
While working in groups, especially while diving into the unknown it is crucial to embrace all of the xp values however respect and communication are key and paramount. Failure to respect others opinions / designs will lead to the project hitting roadbumps and failing to actually make progress.
Communication is so key within projects and teams. Keeping everyone upto date with progress via standups / slack / github is cruicial. Key conversations to have at the beginning of the projects need to be around architecture of file paths / technologies to use / how to communicate issues.
The group I had exemplified this, we also trusted explicitly that the other pair would deliver on what they were required to do which meant that working in isolation was not a concern. This lead to merge conflicts over whitespace and actual full integration taking ten minutes. All in all ggwp.
(Big thanks to Micheal, Alex and Elena)
