— General, Projects, Musings — 2 min read
Project Three felt like a month. A rewarding month, don't get me wrong. But it was exhausting. Working in a group is so different from working alone. But I walked away with some pretty valuable takeaways.
Put more time into planning - when I'm working on a solo project, my planning consists of drawing wireframes, sorting out my database schemas, and planning routes. I also write up a plan for the week, factoring in a couple buffer days towards the end to iron out any kinks in my work. But on a group project, planning looked different. We initially put together a plan in under two hours. Our wireframes were rough around the edges, but we all walked away thinking we were on the same page. That ended up not being the case...modals were moved, the home page took on a life of its own... We should have put more time into drawing out detailed wireframes. It would have saved us a lot of time and frustration when it came to getting a finished project ready for submission.
Review your code together - we ran into some authentication problems. And by some problems, I mean a lot of problems. I had a pretty easy go at implementing authentication on my last project, so instead of hopping in to the code to just fix what was broken, I set time with my group members to look over what we had set up. We talked through the code, everybody understood where our work had gone sour, and we walked away feeling pretty good. It was fun to work together like that, especially since we can't work together in person.
Be patient with yourself, and be honest with where you're at - towards the end of the week I was really feeling the hours; of the project, of bootcamp. I needed a break one afternoon; my brain stopped working and the only thing that could fix it was icecream and a couple hours away from the screen. The art of communication over Slack is one that must be honed; disappearing from your desk chair is tempting. I shot over a message to my group members, let them know where I was at and that I'd have my phone on me if they needed me. And then I enjoyed a scoop of chocolate icecream and went for a walk.
Project Three aside, this week was an intro to Ruby; covering off on Ruby basics, classes, rake, activerecord, classes, modules, and Sinatra. That doesn't sound like much of an intro when it's written out and not fragmented in lecture repositiories on Github. Ruby's cool, I like it, I'll write more about it next week.