Acebook by Team Splendaberg — Day 1
Author: Julian Ng
Date: Monday 9th April 2018
Rails Fast, Rails Hard
Week 8 at Makers Academy and we’re back on to Ruby after 3 weeks of JavaScript. Except, this time, we’re putting on the training wheels… Wait, what?
You heard me. For the next two weeks, we’ll be finding out how everything that we’ve learnt over the last 7 weeks can actually pretty much all be automatically set up using the Ruby on Rails framework! Having said that, the benefit of doing it this way around is that we have an understanding of how the magic that is Rails works. This is important because it does a lot for you, very quickly, and usually with just one or two commands. This includes setting up template files and folders, creating and managing SQL databases, installing gems, and much more.
The project objective is to create our own full-stack Rails social media web app using a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, whilst learning how to effectively operate in a software development team for a decent amount of time. Even in our weekly JavaScript project teams in the previous weeks, our timescale was cut short due to the Easter bank holidays on both occasions. This makes it all the more important to follow the XP Values (Communication, Simplicity, Feedback, Courage, Respect) to ensure that our team dynamics and cohesion remain high and enabling us to write beautiful code.
Day 1 Retro
Unfortunately, half the team (i.e. 2 people) were off for medical reasons, so it was just me and Tom today. We accomplished what felt like a lot and the pace certainly seems to be much quicker than in previous challenges — I’d like to think that it’s because we’re getting better, but we can’t take all the credit as I imagine Rails was just doing the hard work for us!
Given we really only started at about 12:30 and there was a mountain of information to absorb, we managed to:
- Set up the project and team environments (Git, Trello, Slack, Medium)
- Understand and break down the specification
- Generate the user stories
- Determine the MVP
- Learn about the basics of Rails
- Implement some front-end views updates
- Deploy the code and database to a live/cloud environment (Heroku)
- Design the README skeleton and add as much info as currently possible
- Start this blog
I’m hoping that by tomorrow we’ll be able to implement most of the remaining MVP features. One thing I’ve learnt from previous team projects is to literally keep MVP as basic as possible. For us, this is:
- Make and view posts
- Make and view comments
- Make and view likes
- Sign up
- Sign in and out
I’m anticipating the difficult part will then come once we try to implement the other features, which arguably are what will make the app an actual social media app. At the same time, I’m quite excited to be making such a complex and realistic / relevant product.
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Team Members & Git Usernames: Alfie Darko (@AlfieDarko), Charlene Bastians (@CharSV5), Julian Ng (@Julesnuggy), and Tom Betts (@T-Betts).
