Day 2 of project week is complete and I am feeling pumped! Today truly has been a great day of team work and more importantly learning.
This morning started off a little differently with a 9am check in with Rich. He reached out yesterday to check in and I suggested a catch up first thing. I really respect Rich as he has no qualms in sharing his woes and fears and definitely makes me comfortable sharing mine — we definitely exchanged some ideas to help up both thrive and the 30 mins flew by!!
Straight into the Dream Team where we were comparing notes on our groups as none of us are working together. There are so many ways to solve a problem that we have all taken differing tacts, different priorities and different ways of splitting up the work. We did decide though, once the course is over we want to do a group project together which I think would be so awesome!
Day 2 of project work started with another planning session this time on creating a user for our Makers BnB. I staked my claim on working on the backend of the project which creates the functionality while yesterday I worked on the frontend which is the visual output that users on the internet see.
As much as I enjoyed the frontend yesterday, I don’t get the same sense of achievement in building as when I do with the backend. The random pairing generator we used paired me off with Hugh who was also working on backend yesterday — which ended up being helpful. After planning out all the possible paths of the user we split off and go to it.
When Hugh and I last paired we actually did very little coding, we spent 95% of the time debating concepts which was super interesting but not very productive. This time we made the concerted effort of output and got to it.
I really appreciated Hugh’s way of approaching Test Driven Development — he sticks to the book of test first with a really steady approach. This is something I have been working on the incremental building of my code and todays session has definitely helped me work through that mental process.
We completed the first half of today’s work just in time for lunch, I was feeling a little restless so decided to pump some music and enjoyed a little vibe throughout my lunch.
Post lunch the agenda is to catch up and merge our code, we had reached out to the coaches for some help with this as our code was conflicting on our test results — as we are running different things we are doing different tests and getting different results but in the same file. When you merge the code back together they clash and refuse to merge.
There is some set you can do for the code not to be uploaded and merged into the online repository but that also wasn’t working. Simo, a new coach at makers, joined us to help us find a solution. I love that the coaches aren’t the oracle with every single answer but help us think through what we know and give us hints on how to find the answer ourselves.
The afternoon session was back to our user functionality and how we would check that the email and password is correct in the database. We had done this with our weekend project but truly that knowledge hadn’t sunk in so this was great revision. Again, we worked really incrementally and got through the task pretty quickly but had the opportunity to have a few debates as well.
We got back together as a team at 4pm to re-merge our code, the other group had come a little unstuck but had worked their way to a solution. We reviewed each others code and got our code to a great place to continue tomorrow. It was about 4.45 and normal some would go to yoga, but today it was cancelled so we continued with some of the planning for tomorrow.
We have decided to add booking functionality next and have planned that out for tomorrow. This project is definitely challenging me, but I am really starting to see how my day to day in my career is going to look, at least at the beginning. Every time I refine my step by step processes, work with multiple people and now in teams, I am 100% sure that my decision to have a career in software development is the right decision!
Cannot wait for tomorrow!
Software and Soca
When playing mas at carnival the truck usually goes pretty slowly down the road, the masqueraders, including me, chip down the road beside it. Chipping is those really small steps you take to keep moving forward but not too fast or you would move away from the music truck.
I feel like I am finally working out how to chip with my code and to celebrate here is the legendary song Chipping down the road by Farmer Nappy ❤
