The week
The first week of our final project is over, and we are only one week away from graduation! It’s so exciting but at the same time pretty scary. We are just about to finish these twelve weeks of intensive software development learning, and will soon be junior developers!
Last week we started to develop our project as a team of four. We are working on a tool that will allow users to play and create a draft for their website structure, and will display the CSS dynamically on the screen. We chose React, a front-end user interface framework that uses JavaScript, as it is a great tool to create independent components that can be reused in different parts of our app.
What I learnt
I learnt React for the first time this week. It’s being a lot of fun, but also quite challenging, as three members of the group are completely new to this technology.
I also put into practice the XP values again this week. It’s easier every time I start working with a new team. I’m finding it very useful to have stand ups every morning as a means to understand everybody’s point of view and ambitions within the project. Having regular meetings throughout the day is helping us to better work as an Agile team.
Struggles
At the beginning of the week we faced some difficulties in order to establish the direction for the project, the priorities, and defining the MVP for the end of the week. As each one of us had a different point of view we spent some time exposing our opinions, and finally agreed on a list of key points to fulfil. What at the beginning of the week was a struggle, ended up being a great success by Friday.
Also, as I’m completely new to React, I found it difficult to understand the flow of information between components, how props and state work, the relationship between a parent component and its children, and testing React components. Thanks to our colleague Malina, who used React in a previous project, we are grasping the principles behind this technology, and by the end of the week we managed to achieve a basic version of our app. Next week we will finish it and present it to our colleagues, friends and family. So exciting!