6 people, One Direction.

Starting a wild fire with just an idea.

Project 2 at WDI was quite a different experience than project 1. This time around, we were placed in groups of 6 or 7, and tasked with building a Rails app from scratch, yet again. However, working with others from ideation to implementation taught us so much more about team workflow and collaborative effort than it did about any new technology.

A coding community

For starters, the basics of Git and GitHub were crucial to the success of our team. We went through an instructor-led mini-sprint for two days before we were released into the wild for our group project, which helped us learn how to branch, merge, and rebase our work effectively. Without this segue into self-directed groups, everything easily could have crashed and burned on the first day. However, thanks to the thoughtful planning and preparation of our WDI instructors, we were aptly prepared to tackle the task without much issue.

What to do, what to do?

The idea that my particular group came up with, WildFire, is a social media driven map to create buzz for a particular event. Each event, when created on our site, is given a specific hashtag. As this hashtag is used (by anyone on Twitter), it hits certain thresholds that reveal more information and clues about the event on a dynamically updated map.

Our goal was to combine the best of everyone’s ideas from the first project, and implement them in a creative and useful way. Using the Twitter REST API, the Devise gem for Rails for user authentication, Google Maps API for the map views, JavaScript, ActionMailer, and many other small tools built for Rails, we were able to bring together an app with quite a bit of functionality.

Staying Agile

Our group held Scrum meetings 3 times a day. Once in the morning, once just before breaking for lunch, and once at the end of the day before everyone went home. Remaining transparent about how we each felt about the group’s progression was crucial to our success, and allowed everyone to contribute with equal weight. This was evident in our final presentation, because it allowed us to each speak authentically about a portion of the project. Additionally, before presenting, we took time to review each person’s contribution to the project so that we could coalesce our understanding of individual portions into what the app is as a whole. It was this particular practice that allowed us to support each other when presenting.