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Project Retrospective: Chingu's Voyage 25 - Team Gecko

My first Chingu project was a great experience!
Mentored by Jim Medlock with a team of 5

We set out to develop a website similar to www.catchafire.com focused on being a resource for Non-Profits to post Web Development tasks for volunteer developers to find, complete and gain recommendations. This would be a place for any developers to give back to non-profits, but it would be focused on those looking to increase their skills and gain credit in the process.

This is what we ended up with after 6 weeks: https://chingu-v25.herokuapp.com/

Working with Cesar Diaz on the backend, I got to further experiment with connecting to an Atlas MongoDB using mongoose. The wealth of options of how to access and update data often brought paralysis through analysis.

Other skills developed:

  • Working with JSON Web Tokens
  • Using Postman to test routes (Such a treasure of a program!)
  • Git version control
  • How to work as a team
  • How to work together jointly on Github
  • With Cesar's help I learned more about advanced routing

What worked:

  • Agile methodology - constant communication
  • Consistent time to meet
  • Working together at the same time
  • Being able to ask questions live of the team
  • Having a mentor to turn to when you are absolutely out of your element

What didn't:

  • Too much prep documentation delayed starting the project; overly complicated
  • Not connecting FE to BE early enough to test functionality
  • Fear of treading on someone else's toes
  • Going too big crashed the project when a CORS incompatibility prevented the FE & BE from working together. Without a greater understanding of connecting the two repos, it would have been advisable to keep the two repos joined as one.

Standouts:

  • Ceasar was a master of the backend, diving into strange new waters without hesitation and almost always swimming back to the surface with a new treasure.
  • Abby brought CSS polish to the project and a solid understanding of React that helped the front end look professional.

In the end, the project wasn't finished and doesn't work. The BE routes work, as tested by Postman and there was a jerry-rigged "solution" to bypass the CORS problem that showed the two repos were talking together, but we might have been better off with just a single repo. I understand that it is a more professional setup to have separate repos, but in this case we didn't have the expertise or time to pull it off. More rapidly connecting FE to BE would have also cut down on wasted time.

Lots to take away from this experience, I thank my teammates: Abby, Olivia, Ryan, Cesar and our Project Owner: Jim Medlock for all of their time and dedication to the project. I hope to return for a future Chingu project.

I hope this was a fair assessment of the project, and would welcome feedback from any of my teammates.

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