(for Part1 of our Makers final project, please see Danielle’s blog post!)
One of the things our team wanted to achieve during our final project at Makers was to learn another new language, and day 2 has been fully centred around that.
It’s been a very steep learning curve but we keep reminding ourselves that yesterday most of us hadn’t heard of Swift or Xcode, and today we are creating working pages with them!
Team6 had its usual morning standup, or sitdown as we had loads to discuss. Our name is the result of our very patient coach counting our teams wrong — there are five teams!— but we’ve kept the name. We’re a bit like the 14th floor in a hotel. They always skip the 13th.
We decided to spend the morning learning the MVC pattern in Xcode. Our most common question was “where is the code”? Having worked with frameworks and libraries such as Rails and Bootstrap, the appearance of acres of ready code was familiar, but this was like navigating a big city without a map.
Maps were in fact the theme of the day for my pair partner Jay and I, as we were charged with getting a basic map, with a location pin, set up for our game. Xcode looks like a friendly user interface when you first open it, but it did require a lot of searching, reading and failures before we got quicker. For maps, you can drag in a ready Map Kit View, into which it is relatively simple to insert coordinates and select your level of zoom.
However the biggest challenge was for us all to integrate our work into a single project and get into the familiar push, pull request, merge, pull pattern in GitHub, which was still beyond our capabilities on Day 1. At about 5:30pm on Day 2, we managed it! We toyed around with creating separate View Controllers (virtual iPhone screens) into one storyboard and merging those, but ended up with creating separate storyboards instead. And it worked.
Here’s our happy but exhausted team in our retro — literally a watercooler moment.
A good resource for us was this Xcode tutorial, using everyone’s favourite FizzBuzz as the example. Having such familiar code as a reference point was extremely useful — now I’ve done FizzBuzz in Ruby, Python and Swift so next it’ll be Javascript, Go and maybe Julia!
Will we have an MVP (minimum viable product) by the end of Day 3 as we’re meant to…? Find out in the next blog!
Alec Walker — https://github.com/AlecDWalker
Danielle Inkster — https://github.com/DanielleInkster
Heli Sivunen — https://github.com/PacificRebel
Jay Issuree — https://github.com/JayIssuree
Josh Davies — https://github.com/JoshDavies
Roberta Mangiapane — https://github.com/robertamangiapane
