Reflections on the ninth week of the Makers course
This was the second week of the Acebook group project, and it got off to a good start. Hotu, Dan, Ash and myself formed an impromptu code review group as we had all used (and struggled with) Node.js for the weekend challenge. Sharing our experiences helped us to realise how much we’d actually learned since the previous week, and we were collectively able to figure out a few problems we’d been having with our code.
In our first group stand up of the week, I said my mood had risen from a 3 (out of 10) to a 6 thanks to the code review therapy session: by the end of the day my mood was up to 8, even 9! The peaks and troughs on the Makers course are definitely getting bigger as the weeks roll on. After the stand up, I worked with Zainab to finish our ticket from the previous week: this involved some simple code to display posts in reverse chronological order. We also wrote some tests in Cypress as well as Jest. The group then came together to merge our code and, rather than the struggles of last week, we managed to merge three branches together with minimal pain! For the first time, I could see the project coming together as a whole. I then worked with Paul on a ticket to implement ‘likes’ on posts: we spent some time discussing and planning what we were going to do, and I felt we were getting on top of the codebase.
We continued the positive vibe on Tuesday. John, our coach for the week, popped into a whole team meeting and seemed pleased with us and our group-working processes (although he advised us to break up our tickets into smaller tasks). Paul and I made good progress on the like button, though I did feel at times that I was speaking too much when I was navigating. In the evening, to unwind(!) I did some Codewars katas including a 5 kyu ‘connect four’ kata which I recommend!
I attended a midweek process workshop which I enjoyed as always. I got some interesting feedback from William, who observed me: in particular, he noticed that my poor indenting had possibly caused me to miss a bug. I was coding in Ruby but because I’d got used to Prettier automatically formatting my indents for JavaScript, my indentation discipline had slipped. This was a good reminder to keep my code neatly formatted.
By Thursday, it was clear that the intensity of the group project had dropped: this was probably a good thing and enabled us to work in a reasonably calm atmosphere as the deadline approached. Zainab and I fixed our program’s log out functionality and then worked on the app’s stylesheet. I’ve not done much CSS, and it’s not the easiest thing to pair program, but I had a surprising amount of fun learning new CSS styles by experimenting with our Acebook app and trying to figure out how to solve individual issues with our overall styling.
In the evening I worked on some code to make sure names and dates would appear on posts. I’m finding that my problem-solving skills with code (aka ability to bodge a solution together under time pressure?) are improving all the time…
Friday morning started off on a positive note as I met with one of my mentees, who is in week one. They have a long road ahead, but they’re really excited: I remember those days well!
On a couple of occasions during this project, I ended up not doing much driving as usual while pairing. I’ve made a mental note to recognise and prevent this in future, and to ensure we take sufficient breaks when pairing as these provide natural points to switch over. Despite this, I was really pleased overall with my contribution to our Acebook app.
Our final product suffered a little bit from last minute changes and tweaks — another lesson for the future! — but our presentation to the rest of the cohort on Friday afternoon went well. We had, after all, achieved what we wanted to do: we have learned a new stack and, for the most part, we had fun while doing so! On reflection, it is amazing how lighthearted and happy our group managed to be in our various meetings despite the stresses and strains of the project. I’m still not sure what to make of the strange experience of moving away from Makers’ recommended path for Acebook, but it was definitely a great challenge.
