The most valuable lesson I learnt from my internship
I finished my amazing internship at Mentally Friendly about a month ago, and I was really surprised that the most valuable thing I learnt wasn’t entirely coding related. It was, in fact, project management, and most importantly, the right way to approach a project, no matter whether it be professional or personal.
Learning how to resist that ‘I must jump straight into coding’ feeling that I know that everyone has is hard, but learning the right way to do it solves a lot of potential time-wasting and made me realise that planning out a project and knowing exactly how to approach it saves so pain.
My project was my portfolio, which the peeps at MF awesomely offered to help me out with (can’t thank you guys enough, honestly).
I first started out with crazy 8’s, which is a great way to break down what features you want without really dwelling too much on it. Basically, you fold a piece of paper in half 8 times & you give yourself 3 minutes to complete it.
Then you do it again, for the features/wireframes you want.
Then you make a physical wireframe (my stationary obsessed ass loved this whole thing, btw), which is an amazing way to wireframe, because you can literally move the sections around until you find what you’re looking for, and if not, move it again.
Once you’re happy with that, then you can start roadmapping out the features and pages you want to build. This is a great way to rule out what you do and don’t want feature-wise before you even think about building it out.
The card colours are categorised as (in my understanding):
Green — Pages | Blue — Features | Yellow — Design | Red — Questions/Issues
The next step is to start eliminating those red cards! Which is harder than you think.
This gave me a great starting point, which, to be honest, I usually have no idea about, and can stress me out because I find myself flying all over the place and starting things without finishing them, which is never a good choice. Not only for your project management, but also for your version control.
You cannot build a project that’s scattered all over the place; future you will not thank you (I just looked at some old code I wrote and ooh boy). Learning how to manage projects in conjunction with using Git is one of the most valuable things as a developer you’ll ever learn.
From there it’s about breaking it down even further to weed out the potential future problems before they even become problems!
Then you can go forth & build!
