Techtalk S01.e04 (Jun 22, 2016)
Yo, Today I, Chu Quang Tú, will be your host. We were doing this techtalk in Highland “boat” coffee shop close to Ho Tay lake with beautiful viewport and acceptable drink lol
This week, we gonna go through these interesting topics :
- Git commits convention & Changelog generator
- Agile/Scrum: About ScrumMaster
- Steps to start personal side-project
- Skim through multi-tenant system’s design (SaaS)
- Tips & tricks : Preview Markdown on OS X
Git commits convention & Changes log generator
We’re using Git and adding commits everyday. It’s critical to have a Git commit convention to help people understand what’re going on (through Git log) and make things consistent.
Following by Goole AngularJS team, we found a good way to handle Git commit messages
or a short guide by Stephen Paris (adopted from AngularJS guide)
But we don’t stop it here yet. Useful & informative git commit messages are good, but because they’re useful & informative so we could generate CHANGELOG from them as well. So we could know exactly what have changed during last release.
We don’t talk too deep about how to do it, but you could try these tools — let’s us know if you need help.
Agile/Scrum: About ScrumMaster
We keep maintaning topic about Agile/Scrum because it’s our methodoloy and we’re working on Scrum everyday.
Hieu Pham asked me about who’s ScrumMaster and what’s his actual role in team, is it matter ? So I answered hime shortly : Yeah man, ScrumMaster is matter.
In short, ScrumMaster is not a Project Manager by a different name, he’s a part of Scrum team who is here to help & teach team about Scrum/Agile aspects but not about product. ScrumMaster is responsible for :
- Helping the team to reach consensus for what can be achieved during a specific period of time.
- Helping the team to reach consensus during the daily scrum.
- Helping the team to stay focused and follow the agreed-upon rules for daily scrums.
- Removing obstacles that are impeding the team’s progress.
- Protecting the team from outside distractions.
You could read more about ScrumMaster at here and here.
Steps to personal Side-project
This is my simple write up based on Hieu Pham ‘s experience when he start working on his new side-project (a cool tool that helps you download whole music album just by entering album URL) . He’s inspired by this post as well.
Sketching
— Hand-drawing :
This step will helps validating data (transform things from your head into realistic item on paper, so you could see how things combine together directly and figure out if anything wrong
And we could also inventing more TODO items (Author page, Adding metadata for SEO, Adding GA scripts … ) from this step , some are good and some are redundant. Just increasing the list, we’ll consider what should be built later — But remember, we always put core functions of product at top priority.
— User Stories :
When doing the hand-draw, we’ll consider seriously about User stories and Use Case, about how users gonna use product, what use case could be possible… This step will interact directly with Hand-draw step, helps us define the flow when users interact with products, improving UI/UX to make the product more usable and useful.
Planning
— We stick to Agile methodologies to make sure we could deliver “something-that-actually-works” as soon as possible. So to simply managing stuff, we use Trello (as Kanban boards) . Then build product backlog from items we invented from Sketching step and break that product backlog input versions that we want to release .
— After organise our TODO items into Trello, we gonna need to polish those tickets by breaking them into as smaller as possible (to make it easier to implement) or we could adding more tickets for experimenting new things to make the product more trendy (improve UX, User stories or apply new tech — fileAPI…)
— After all, we gonna need to put an estimation to all tickets that we will work on. Adding an estimation & tracking working time is necessary, without it we will not know how much efforts we gonna need to finish the project or it will keep forever.
Action
Now we could start putting our hand into building project, we’ll need to find a good pressure to make sure we could get the job done. It will help us building a good routine.
But don’t think too much about how should we do the works on it, your enjoyment is much much more important. Remember it’s a side-project, remember why did you start working it on it. So if it make you tired, you should stop doing it anytime.
Skim through multi-tenant system’s design (SaaS)
We don’t have anytime for this topic yet. Maybe next time I’ll cover this topic. My wife called so we had to end this techtalk :D
Tips & tricks : Preview Markdown on MacOS
As you know Markdown is simple formatting syntax that allow us accomplish the same thing that HTML does. And it’s a “must-known” tool for all developer.
If we want to view end result of a markdown, we gonna need to build it or view it from an editor. Sometimes we just wanna get a preview like other text files on OS X but it doesn’t support Markdown. So let me introduce you a tool :
qlmarkdown allows you to preview markdown files (*.md) by using Preview app — just like other text files. Hope you enjoy this.
Conclusion
So far so good. We covered a lot topic in this techtalk and really enjoyed it. If you’re interesting in any part of Web development just let us know, It would be our next topic or you could bring it to us. Cheers.
