The week
We worked in randomly allocated groups, as we did last week. We had very good communication, and every day was productive and very fun. We worked on two projects:
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A single-page application to keep track of short notes. We weren’t allowed to use any external libraries, so we had to write our own test framework, and implement all the logic for the application using vanilla JavaScript.
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Another app to show the ten latest news from an online newspaper. Again we couldn’t use any external libraries, so we implemented a small utility function to make XHR requests, and used it to fetch news from the API of a newspaper.
What I learnt
This week we took our time to truly understand JavaScript concepts. We managed to complete the note-taking app, and almost finished the news feed app. The week was one of the most challenging in terms of team management and work delivery. We had much less support from our coach than in previous weeks.
It was a great opportunity to build on the lessons we had learnt the previous week around collaboration and communication within the team. We organised our stand-up meetings every morning, and retros in the evenings to share feedback, reflect on the day, and plan the next one.
Struggles
The main things I struggled with were the lack of structure, and not knowing how to start our project. But we managed to break the problem into pieces. This approach helped us understand what the expected outcome was, and allowed us to focus on solving smaller, more manageable problems. By the end of the week we had a fully working single-page app.
Week seven was the best week at Makers so far. The great connection between all members of the team made our work high-quality, and very gratifying!