Acebook day 7 — “How many fingers does my hand have?”
You’d think that a team made of people who forget about the basics would struggle with writing “Hello World” with a crayon. And instead… I’d recommend to check the next few lines to witness the amount of stuff this team managed to achieve in only one day.
The day started with a quick stand up where the insomniac Bootstrap Master Irfan enlightened us all about his 4:00 am beautification of Acebook. It is safe to say that the master made the crowd go wild with a unique, never seen before, design. We then moved on setting up the goals for the day:
- Fix two painful tests relating to the implementation of likes and the kick-ass dislikes features.
- Finish implementing comment-related functionalities
- Sort the navbar out
- Try and make the app even more stylish
We decided to work in the same pairs as yesterday, just to give a bit of continuity to our work.
Now masters of gaining visibility (shout out to Sensei Ed) in feature testing. Agnes and I felt much more comfortable in tackling this big comment feature monster. We test drove the implementation of comment creation rather smoothly and felt like we were ready to become the CEO and CTO of the hottest unicorn startup since MySpace. Capybara, obviously gave us the usual reality check. This time, the cute little mammal was complaining about not being able to find a div. We felt like we were in an Adele’s song. Thankfully, coach Eddie promptly came to rescue us out of the awful mammal’s clutches and made us realise that, if we want to be successful “startuppers”, who live on lavender coffee and carobs, we need to be able to distinguish between dots and hashes. Relieved by Eddie’s aid, we also managed to implement the comment deletion functionality.
Ammar and Irfan (AI), in the meantime, had already founded and bankrupted four startups. They fixed the feature tests for likes and dislikes. Along with that, they streamlined the app’s views creating partial renders, and made a heroic effort to improve the navigation experience by resolving several “odds and ends”. If you haven’t seen the two men from the golden age working together, I would suggest you take the chance to do so: it’s refreshing to see them solving issues in the most laidback way. Also it’s free.
As a bonus, we also enabled non-registered users to see posts (why would you not want to register to such an amazing social media?) [shoutout to StackOverflow].
The retro turned out to be quite insightful. After giving me the opportunity of drawing six-finger hands, the wise part of the team decide it was time to disentangle the thoughts on our day.
What went down:
- Energy levels: we realised that we don’t really take breaks, sometimes we don’t even eat; and some of us would rather pass a test instead of performing physiological functions.
- Tunnel vision: it gets quite frustrating not to be able to spot relatively obvious errors.
- Blind Capybara.
What didn’t go anywhere:
- Copy/Past..Type!: even if we understand what we re-type, we feel like that we wouldn’t be able to reproduce it in other context.
- Not enough testing.
- Branching and merging: we felt like we should branch more often and have a clearer picture of when and what to merge. We thought that a good idea would be to review a functionality as soon as implemented and then merge, to avoid annoying conflicts.
What went well:
- The relationship between Irfan and TDD: orange blossom coming soon.
- Breakthrough on comments: big confidence boost for Agnes and I.
- Positive, laidback and productive team.
All in all, it was a really good day, I would say we achieved about 85% of our daily MVP.
Tomorrow’s menu should include:
- Defeat the comment beast by implementing user’s comment ownership.
- Look into deployment.
- AJAX features.
#teamGeniusAndRecklessness.
