Jennifer Shepherd
Ed Perkins. Ellie Wem. Jennifer Shepherd. Roland Vink.
Our final fortnight at Makers Academy has begun and so has the evolution of dawn. The culmination of 9 weeks of pairing and group work, we now choose our own project to build in 9 working days. We have total freedom to choose our tech stack and the scope of the project, but have been given some direction for our timeline. We aim to meet our MVP by close of play on Wednesday, and then continue to increase the complexities of user interactions as we continue through the week. Next Tuesday we will reach a feature freeze where we’ll stop building, but then we’ll turn our focus to refactoring our code to ensure we are proud of it and that it meets the principles of clean code that we’ve grown accustomed to here at Makers.
I (Jennifer) am going to talk about how we spent our first day.
Before we even began to code, it was vital to us that we established ‘ground rules’ for the way we’ll work together.
Having a daily routine was important to us so that we could ensure success on line 15: tight feedback loops. Keeping open, regular communication will help us support each other and address concerns or problems as they arise. Alongside this, we want to avoid any individual team member adopting an apathetic approach to the project — out of respect for each other and the project. This could look like passive responses such as ‘whatever everyone wants’. We want everyone to be engaged, valued and therefore active participants in the evolution of dawn.
Every morning, after we’ve had our stand-up to take stock of the day ahead, we’ll check-in with each other regarding our mental wellbeing. A number out of 10 for confidence and motivation will help us be mindful of how we are starting the day at that very moment. Anything tangible and appropriate can be shared or addressed. It will help us to be productive and mindful of the team dynamics.
As with each challenge we’ve faced at Makers, we want our learning to be more important than reaching arbitrary points in our project. This is an opportunity afforded by our status as students here and there may be different pressures on us in a workplace. We’ll share our code and ensure everyone is comfortable with what gets merged to our github repo so that we share ownership of our codebase and all make progress together as a team.
To help with communication, organisation and that ever important question ‘Are you having fun?’, we have created our own Slack. Slackbot reminds us regularly to stay hydrated, share feedback mid-afternoon, and do standups and retros morning and night. We have a channel linked to the github repo so that every time something changes, we are notified. Compliments, encouragement and thanks will be shared in Appreciations and thoughts for what we want to document here get posted to Blog. Of course, we’re using ruby code to randomly select the blog writer and pairs each day!
Extreme Programming (XP) values are fundamental to a successful project and we’ll work to demonstrate and grow in them as the project progresses. Tomorrow, Ed will share how our project has been conceived and why the project has been named dawn. I’m excited to start coding!
