It is truly wild what a rollercoaster of emotions this course is and this week — Week 8!!! is no different. This weekend we were tasked with building a news aggregator app taking data from the Guardian API and displaying key information.
This weekend, for the first time I didn’t feel lost in the wilderness. That is not to say it wasn’t hard, it was but I felt like I had enough knowledge to manoeuvre my way out of each issue as it arose. This was thanks to my work in drilling down into how APIs work.
The issues I couldn’t work out were more due to error’s with the API and not me. What I hadn’t thought about is how ‘successful’ I feel with my weekend challenge directly impacting everything else I am doing. So here we are Monday into a new 2 week group project.
Dream Team was spent sharing best practice of what worked and didn’t for us over the weekend — that and ogling over Karsten’s Sushi platters his brother made for dinner. Also some speculation of what our project and associated groups may look like and finally some speculation of a meet up for when lockdown is lifted, talks of pints in Dulwich Park.
My code review this morning was with Jonathan, we haven’t crossed paths since we last paired in Week 2! He decided to continue with last weekends bowling challenge so we had a look at each others code before our hour flew by and we were off to our weekly kickoff.
Alex was our lead coach this two week project with support from Alice as he is still new. He announces we will be building ‘Acebook’ (yes, sounds very similar) using Ruby on Rails — this will bring together our backend Ruby knowledge with our Javascript front end knowledge.
My group is the biggest of the cohort with 6 of us tackling this challenge. Pete, Miranda, Hamish, Anna, Joe and myself make up team Poke — in homage to the most random functionality Facebook built.
After lunch we set up our Team Charter — an agreement of how we will work as a team, our group github and our team documentation. Finally we had to organise our first 2 day sprint (the time period for our first section of work). I had some previous experiences of Scrums and Sprints — ways of organising tech projects.
When working for MassChallenge, I used to join the tech team planning meetings to organise their sprints and advocate for the work my team needed doing. I explained this further to the team as none of them had worked with teams in this way before — this ended me with being given the job of Scrum Master for the first sprint.
We spent the next hour organising the work we want to complete for the sprint, while getting to grips with what the MVP is for the project. Time was short as I was off to my second external review at 4pm.
This time my reviewer was Pierre, a new reviewer for Makers. I was still on a high from the weekend project so I lost the fear for the review, it also helped that I knew what I was walking into. This time, I absolutely smashed it! I just let my knowledge lead me and it really paid off. I am excited to receive my feedback and I want to keep practicing, getting ready for these job interviews.
Software and Soca
Today is St Lucia’s 42nd independence day and an awesome project has been released celebrating all sorts of Lucian music — I hope you enjoy and Happy Independence St Lucia! ❤
