Makers Academy W6 D4 — Fake it ‘til you make it.
TL;DR- In which I had to present an incomplete product to a large room of people
Overall
Today I encountered the most annoying error I think I’ve encountered to date. Hasan (theoretical physicist extraordinaire) and myself dropped a couple of hours by crawling step by step back through a monolithic error trace. In short, our Air BnB clone app was deleting a user’s session (obnoxious lingo for logging out) in an odd place. However, where that odd place was? Not a clue. Following the teeniest of tiny breadcrumbs, we eventually found the place where we could see the error happening. However, we couldn’t figure out why. We fully deleted and rewrote 2 lines of code and it worked. This means it was probably a typo (I couldn’t spot it for the life of me )— which was honestly the most soul crushing thing to find out. You live and learn ey?
Presentations:
Late-ish on in the day, we realised that we needed to present our projects to the rest of our peers. A state of panic began. After a rushed coding sprint to coerce our website into a state that could be described as visually presentable, we stumbled into the presentation room still trying to fix bugs that were strewn around our tests.
I was, without a doubt, uncomfortable to present a product that I saw as incomplete but I had come to terms with it. However, this quickly changed when I was eyeballing team#1s absolutely stunning brain child.
We followed after them and, having listened to a podcast on the law of sequencing, I knew that the contrast between their impeccably styled build and our bootstrap bootleg of an app would make ours look even worse. So, we changed tack a bit and opted for a self-deprecating presentation style that gave us the ‘endearingly rubbish’ quality which, in fairness, I found thoroughly entertaining (not sure if anyone else did though!)
Friday Night Shenanigans.
After the intensity of the week long project I felt somewhat deflated from the overload of mental expenditure I had made. However, a sucker for the brew, I had a few bottles of Becks and really rather quickly got into the swing of things anyway.
This week was a social organised by Dana to celebrate the opening of the kitchen and as a thank you for putting up with the amount of building work that’s been happening over the last 3 weeks which was a lovely gesture.
The highlight of the social was definitely the company and the food. More specifically, the swathes of burgers the size of golfballs. They were probably the teeniest tiny things I’ve ever seen but who knew something so small could contain so much flavour. Another surreal highlight was when Euge professed to have a heightened sense of smell. Calling her out, we then had to blindfold her, and get her to identify everyone by smell. The odd thing was, that she actually managed to get 8 out of 8 people correct. Not sure whether to be impressed or worried.
Ate At: the makers kitchen.
Not that you’ll particularly care, but the sandwich trial that I started yesterday is still going strong. I now scrawl my name over all my food so I can leave it confidently in the communal fridge without the risk of it disappearing. (Although I’m not really sure anyone would want to eat anything labelled ‘Nick’s Cucumber’ anyway).
Learnt:
Bootstrap:
Or rather, how to copy and paste people’s code of the internet. The styling came together deliciously quickly but it did look like any tech start up website ever. Another thing I would observe is that if you don’t have an enormous grasp of CSS it’s kind of hard to battle against/ customise an enormous and well established framework when you don’t really know what you’re doing.
Style as you go.
We made the mistake of leaving styling until the last hour of a week long project. In terms of time distribution, this was possibly a bit of an oversight. Watching everyone’s presentations, I pretty much decided that my opinion of the quality of the back end coding was based nearly entirely on the slickness of the front end. Ours was a sort of semi-completed, cobbled together rubbish maelstrom that would pass in most contexts but paled in comparison to the good work.
If you made it this far,
Rupp Love X
