Makers Academy Final Project — Day 06 or our first day without a white board.
Hello Everyone, it’s Léa here to talk about the sixth day in our Makers Academy final project. You will all be pleased and relieved to know that Team Processive had a great day!
Our process
It’s Saturday, and on weekends Makers Academy is closed.
But fear not, we organised ourselves to work at Keran’s flat.
After the emotional roller coster of yesterday, we decided to focus on achieving small and clearly stated goals, which we thought would be more uplifting and motivating.
Probably thanks to that idea, everything from API request to testing, including our snack corner, was taken to another level.
We started our day with a short oral standup, reviewing our work from the past days and distributing today’s tasks through Trello. Once again breaking the team into three pairs, research on databases, API requests, and of course testing, testing, testing.
Due to the accumulation of small wins, cheer up and communication, the overall group energy and fluidity had improved a lot compared to yesterday. We encountered some challenges, of course, but they were completely manageable (e.g. set up problems, typos, or figuring out how the routes work in Vue.js).
Today was a typical day where the Makers Academy mantra resonated well with all of us: “We were all having fun and we were better developers than yesterday”.
Our tech stack
Nik and Keran started by doing research on Mongo, and setting up documentation, finding tutorials to see how we were going to implement a user database.
Ellie and Vale worked on an API request and adapted the converted image to be sent as a base64 string.
Lan and I worked on the front end, focusing on feature tests and learning more about Nightwatch conventions for mocking and its overall syntax.
To keep the group fluidity alive which we have been striving for since the beginning of the final project, we decided to switch pairs again.
Ellie and Keran searched other database options and introduced to the team the idea of using Google Firebase, which would make the database easily interact with a front end system like Vue.js and decided to do tutorials on the subject.
Vale and Nik continued working on the API request and used the string previously converted to find a way to filter the information that was sent back.
After fixing a problem that gave us a scare of having used all of our quota of free API requests through testing, we had our big win of the day :
We managed to take the response from the API and filter out the required information which was, in our case, the website address.
After today, we’re seeing more and more of our final polished product taking shape.
However, we still have a long way to go!
End of the day retro
After a nice retro decorated with fairy lights and many “what went well” sticky notes…
We set up some goals for tomorrow :
- We now need to use the infamous URL response from the API request.
- We need to think about the design of our app: the fonts, the logo, the name...
- We need to think about remodelling some of our users stories that don’t fit in our project’s scope anymore, like the booking notification, or the redirection to buy tickets.
- We need to look into how to implement notifications, or integrate the events with Google calendar.
- We need to look into our idea of migrating into the progressive web app platform, which would help store data when the user doesn’t have connectivity.
Our mindful corner
Even with no white board, we still needed our thought of the day. Even though it started as a team joke, it went on to become an opportunity for other teams in our cohort to creatively vandalise it. Now, it has transcended into something that we care about and helps us stay motivated and have fun.
This thought of the day was inspired by the struggles we had to go through on Friday morning.
We’re ready for tomorrow, the last day of our first week into our final project. We will have a new working environment: Vale’s place… brace yourselves for cute kitten pics.
