So it begins…
Meet in the Middle is born.
The final two weeks of Makers (a 12 week intensive coding bootcamp in London) is devoted to a final group project which is presented at a ‘demo day’, to potential students, friends and family.
Last Friday all of our cohort got together to have an ideas session in which we generated almost 60 ideas for possible coding projects by sticking post-it notes on the whiteboard. These ideas were then grouped into categories and we had to vote for our first and second choices. Luckily I was given my first choice (Recreation and going out) along with five of my coding buddies who made the same choice (Genny, Tim, Toby, Richie and Will).
We narrowed down the ten possible ideas in our category into a shortlist of five viable products and eventually decided to go with ‘Meet in the Middle’. This was actually one of the ideas I pitched, inspired by a good friend of mine who lives in Cornwall. She has a a group of friends from University dotted around the country and they generally struggle to find a fair place for them all to meet up. So the idea - an app which takes all of their locations, calculates a middle spot and also recommends some bars, hotels or restaurants to visit while they’re there!
To kick off the project we had an intensive planning session to cover the following:
- Deciding our MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
- Deciding on our team processes
- Deciding our tech stack
- Deciding our tools
- General admin — slack channel, trello board, wiki page and github repo
MVP -An app which allows the user to enter two locations in London and view the middle point on a map.
We scaled back the original plan to focus on London rather than the whole of the Uk (world?) to make it more manageable when calculating transport routes. If we have time then we intend to expand outside of London.
We decided to have our backend in Rails and our front end in React and to test drive the development using RSpec, Capybara and Jest. Our team will have daily stand ups and retros. We also decided to have a rota for project leadership and managing the group admin.
We aimed to have completed the MVP by close of play Wednesday, 3 days into the project. We spent day one setting up our backend in Rails, although the only function we actually required from our backend was the ‘users’ facility. We initially used the Ruby gem ‘devise’ to set up our users, however we found it too difficult to convert this into an API to use in React as we couldn’t get visibility as to where the user data was coming from. Instead we set up our users the old-fashioned way. We also set up our testing structures.
On day two, we switched our project leader for the day and kicked off with a stand-up and a mood check-in. After drawing up a todo list we spent the day getting to grips with the google maps API which is an integral feature of our app. We also focussed on learning how we would test using Jest and deploying our app to Heroku using Travis for continuous integration.
We ended the day with an app that contains a map and a text box which allows you to search the map for a location using autocomplete and then place a marker on the location. Progress!
Check out part two of our journey over on Will’s blog.
