auctions.csnglobal.net — An initiative
carsales Women In Tech (WIT for short) creates opportunities to learn and practice tech skills. From October to December 2019 we took the plunge and built a website from scratch. The idea was to create a low stakes environment for each of us to get exposure to work we wouldn’t usually have time to learn, or were considering moving into and wanted to know more about. The end game was to produce an auctions site for model cars and donate the proceeds of sales to the carsales Foundation.
Thisauctions.csnglobal.net article is the first installment of a three part series. The series is a deep dive into three peoples experiences while working on the site. We’ll each touch on how we did it, what we learned and what we’ll be doing moving forward. You can find Part 2 here. Keep an eye out for the final articles which will be published shortly.
How did we start?
So how does one start a project such as this? With a whole-team meeting, of course! It wasn’t your typical meeting with a chairperson and minutes. This one was an open floor discussion, the contents of which would pave the way for the next three months. We looked to the day-to-day structure and key stakeholder roles of a typical project at carsales and landed on product managers, frontend developer, backend developer and QA (software tester). We needed champions to guide the groups, organise regular catch ups and act as the liaison between other roles. Each champion was put forward when they volunteered which gave an opportunity to try something new. Everyone was encouraged to step outside their comfort zone so we even had people with no tech background championing things like product management and QA, and backend devs getting hands on with frontend development.
Once the dust settled on who was doing what, we split off into groups and established ways of communication through Jira, Slack and regular small team meetings. Our working groups were 3–4 people strong. Throughout the project we had all-ins (meetings for the whole team to attend) for everything from refining requirements to implementing bug fixes. The benefit of the all-ins was that it made a safe space for people who were not confident about their knowledge to ask questions and learn quickly.
How did we juggle work and…work?
While this project was openly endorsed by the tech department (bless the cotton socks of our leadership team), it was an extra-curricula. For the first month of the project we held a fairly loose reign. That’s code for “We didn’t prioritise it”. As we got closer to the crunch and noticed that our fellow company peeps were easing into a buzzing Christmas shopping vibe we realised we had to be a little more realistic about what we wanted to do if we were to take advantage of the festive frenzy. It was at this time that we started to notice that our actual teams, the ones we worked with day-to-day, had made minor and effective adjustments to allow us extra time to work on the auctions site. It was incredibly supportive and generous. In addition to this we started working during our lunches and by this I mean invariably, every lunch break, for the following two months. The coveted lunch hour was commandeered by discussions about controllers, interfaces, error handling and data normalisation. These two factors hurtled us towards our release date and eventuated in a usable, fully integrated live site.
Other ways we bolstered our knowledge and confidence were with some serious study outside of work hours. Once or twice a week was often enough to get the brain juices alight with what we were working on day by day. Another technique I tried out was pair-programming sessions with incredibly skilled and time-generous developers. It was fruitful and made learning surprisingly fast because many things became apparent very quickly. For example, I quickly learned how directories are linked in C#, how to import libraries at the click of a button and even grasped a general sense of how to write readable and debuggable code. All these skills are Google-able to some extent, but I can safely say that seeing a pro in action for 60 minutes is easily worth more than 24 hours of Googling. All in all, my mindset around development has adjusted from “coding is for the math genius who’s been doing it from the age of 3” to “if I keep at this, maybe I’ll be able to make some arbitrary and basic application and go from there”
During & after the release
I’d be lying if I said that tensions didn’t run high. Not the bad kind that causes a stress puddle and makes it seem as though time is slipping through your fingers like sand, but in fact the opposite, where you’re focused, proactive and motivated. There was so much passion for this project that the perfectionism monster was kept subdued by a healthy dash of group invigorated resilience and a good deal of quick decision making. I learned a lot of techniques on how to steer towards a little thing called the minimum viable product (MVP) from watching the more experienced managers keep us on track. I liked how the more experienced people in our teams allowed each of us take to it in our own way, and guided us to the finish line gently when it was needed. With our killer team of QA we covered all our major bugs (sigh of relief) which I can say with confidence since the first release went off without a hitch.
What’s next
For the next project I’d like to see us spend more time on the preparation and initialisation of the project. I think there’s plenty of opportunity to assist people edging towards, but unsure of, anything from a dalliance to a career in technology. We can do this by doing one or two introductory workshops with lightweight homework attached and aimed at imparting basic skills before the kick off. Yes it might sound like a drag, but what better way to hit the ground running when the project starts? This would mean that when the work is in full swing, we’d enter a ‘practice’ phase where we can play around with our new found knowledge. If I take nothing else away from this experience, it is that the critical factor in building confidence in a new skill, is not just knowledge, but to practice it.
Other articles
auctions.csnglobal.net — The Creation by Stephanie McDonald
Steph has written about her experience doing full stack for the project. She learned heaps has shared her highs and lows.
Coming soon is auctions.csnglobal.net — At the End by Jigyasa
