Acebook — Day 1

Short Ferret
Nov 4 · 2 min read

Here begins the tale of team Short Ferret Midnight. You know that with a name like that, it can only end in victory.

The September 2019 cohort began week 8 of their Makers journey with our most formidable project to date — 10 days to build our own version of a popular social network using Ruby on Rails, which none of us have used previously. We like to call it ‘Acebook’, not to be confused with any books of faces. Of course not.

Team Short Ferret Midnight is comprised of 6 gorgeous, talented and oh-so-humble students:

  • Brad Phillips
  • Danielle Inkster
  • Jay Issuree
  • Jess Marais
  • Nathan Hynes
  • Yas Kemp

After being assigned our team and given some helpful reading and resources (seriously, Trello? Game changer!), it was left up to us to decide how to proceed. We spent our morning perusing the reading and making a game plan. Today, we chose to complete all basic setup requirements in teams of two; anyone who finished early could continue the reading or help other teams. We made our estimates for time (ambitious though they were) and split into teams.

Team 1- Today Brad and Jess set up our Gemfile, including Rubocop and Simplecov for test coverage, code quality, and code style checks. They also set up some of the more pertinent details in our README file.

Team 2- Yas and Nathan worked to integrate Travis CI, used to build and test projects hosted at Github (like ours!). It was a surprisingly finicky process.

Team 3- Jay and Danielle set up our project to run on Heroku for eventual deployment of the app. Fun fact, Heroku generates some pretty…unique sub-domain names. Case in point, in two weeks time you’ll be able to check out our finished product at ‘salty-peak-83707.herokuapp.com.’

In today’s retro, our team discussed what went well and what needed to be addressed tomorrow. We have a few more tweaks to make to add Rubocop to Travis CI as well as finish setting up the CodeClimate gem. Following that, we plan to get to work on defining and creating our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We also reviewed how we plan to meet the goals set out for this project which include good testing practices, good distribution of work, good quality of work and good documentation .

Keep an eye on this space for updates! We’ll be blogging daily about Team Short Ferret Midnight’s journey into Ruby on Rails mastery (or madness, but that would also be a journey worth reading about.) We’ll keep you up-to-date with all of our trials and triumphs in our leaning.

And if you’re wondering where the team name came from? Check it out.

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