Week 8 — Santander Project
We had known for a while that during week 8 we would be working on a project all week for Santander. On Monday morning Chris put us into new teams and Alex from Santander came to present the project to us. We then had the rest of the day to understand the problem and plan how we were going to work on a solution. It soon became apparent that this was going to be a lot to try to fit into just three days of coding! So, we tried to narrow down what our Minimal Viable Product (MVP) would be, and what we would need to work on first. We finished Monday with a plan, which was broken down into issues with each one estimated for how complex it was, ready to start work on Tuesday morning.
On Tuesday, after a quick team stand-up meeting, we split into pairs and got working. I was in a pair working on getting the main functionality for the front-end application started while the other pair worked on setting up a database and server. We split the day up by having a few catch-up team meetings and the day flew past. By the end of Tuesday we realised what a massive job this actually was and that we had to scale back what we realistically thought we could get done over the next two days.
On Wednesday came my proudest moment — getting drag and drop functionality working in our react app. Different approaches were tried for database design, which took some time but we learnt a lot from it so we weren’t worried that we might have ‘wasted’ time. Thursday was about getting the front and back ends communicating, getting data from the database and rendering it on the page.
Friday was dedicated to doing a few finishing touches, sorting out the presentation and then waiting to present. Unfortunately, our group was last so while the others finished and went to sit in the sun drinking prosecco we were waiting and pacing…. The presentation went well and we all felt we had done a good job.
We switched pairs each day so that we were working in different pairs every day, getting experience of all aspects of the project: database, server and front end, which was difficult because tasks didn’t neatly finish at the end of each day so we often found ourselves picking up someone else’s work but that was part of the challenge.
One of the things I most enjoyed about the project was getting my teeth into a larger project and being able to focus on getting some more complicated functionality designed and completed. I think all the years dedicated to maths helped here as breaking down problems into smaller components comes naturally to me.
