DEV Community: Rafael D. Hernandez

3 Key Elements to Have a Successful Chingu Voyage.

Rafael D. Hernandez — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 05:13:20 +0000

Whether you are on your first voyage or one of many, I learned that having templates, detailed goals, and defined roles for each member are fundamental to having a successful voyage at Chingu.

Templates are your best friend

Every week we had an hour video conference, and we discovered very soon that sometimes it was hard to understand each other or there was not enough time to cover all the points on the agenda. For this reason, we incorporated a meeting template with an outline for us to follow in our meetings. This meeting template got filled by each member before the meeting day. The outline included two main sections that I believe were important to have transparent and to the point meetings. The first section was three questions addressing what we did the previous week and what we were planning to take on for next week. The second section was to write down any questions or/and suggestions we would have. My teammate Ming talks more in detail about these sections in our showcase blog post here if you are interested in knowing more about it.

We included templates in other areas to help us be consistent and had a much smoother workflow throughout our voyage. For instance, we created a template for pull requests on GitHub, and for blog post logs.

Templates will save you time, confusion, and from so much more. I highly recommend implementing templates since day one for your voyages.

Set Goals - "The Devil is in the Detail"

Detailed goals will help your team to know what to expect of you and other members. In our team, a goal represented a feature for our web application like a TODO, for example. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to complete this feature in a week, so we would continue to work on the feature for another week until we got it finished. Having these cleared goals established at the beginning of the voyage will enable you to have a clear idea of what it is needed to complete your MVP (most important product) successfully within the six week voyage.

Assigned Roles

I firmly believe this is the most crucial key element if you want to have a successful voyage. Each member of the team was honest about their strengths, weakness, and areas each felt comfortable to work on the project. By setting roles at the beginning of our voyage based on these inputs, we avoid confusion and false expectations that could have emerged. Even if these roles get modified or entirely interchanged with a different member, having these roles will always make things move forward faster on your voyage.

If you are interested in knowing more about the project and team, I worked on Chingu Voyage13, follow the links in our first Sprint blog post.

Thank you for reading this far. I genuinely hope it helps you and your team to have an awesome time working together.

Shout out to the Toucans03 MoTo teamates Ola, Ming, and Sophia Li.

Don't know what Chingu is all about? You are missing out! Read about this excellent program here.

Sprint 6: Chingu Voyage Log: MoTo is Alive!!

Rafael D. Hernandez — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 18:15:52 +0000

MoTo is alive! Well, more like its live at Netlify and GitHub. Its has been six weeks of hard work, weekly meetings, hundreds of messages back and forth on Discord, multiple pull requests, pull request conflicts, and tons of lines of code. We set our MVP, and we delivered.

Weekly Debriefing

Each member answered our weekly questions before our weekly meeting on a Google doc, asked questions, and suggestions on our previous process and moving forward, specifically on our GitHub PR process.

Week's Tasks and Features

Ming worked on the MIT feature, tried the responsiveness on mobile landscape but had some trouble making it work properly. She also worked on the pomodoro responsive layout and helped Sophia Li with the modal code. Sophia worked on the TODO feature, gave the final touches to the previous sprint blog post, and did some research on how to do a Chrome extension, which MoTo is currently on 'pending review'.

I worked on the responsive layout for small screens and landscape view for the Pomodoro modal. I also worked on the Weather UI, and researched about 'git-secret' to figure out how to hide and use once deployed the weather API key. I had no success figuring out how to hide and use the API key since we did not use any framework, but HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Ola had to visit family and she was not going to be able to continue to participate for the last two weeks of the voyage but worked hard to complete her previous tasks and hoped to help with the publishing of MoTo.

Team Toucans03 - MoTo Reflections

We, the Toucans03 are an excellent team, and I was fortunate to be part of it. I gained invaluable friendships and working experience. I learned a lot about development, planning, and communication, which I need to practice more. Ming was glad to be part of a dedicated team and had a great time working with all of us. Sophia Li was excited that we made a real app and completed it in just 6 to 7 weeks.

This blog post is written by Rafael Davis Hernandez and reviewed by Ming, and Sophia before publishing. Join us on our journey! Learn more by reading our voyage logs: sprint 1, sprint 2, sprint 3, sprint 4, sprint 5, FINAL POST🚀.

Chingu Voyage Log: Start Your Engines and Let's Go! Sprint 3

Rafael D. Hernandez — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 19:17:54 +0000

MoTo, which is the name of our app that stands for Momentum Toucans, is starting to take form. With our first draft sketches and wireframes in place, each of us took a feature or responsibility to work on this week.

Weekly Debriefing

Our weekly meetings starts by going over 3 key questions and it is followed by any suggestions. These questions are answered by each member preferably before our weekly meeting on a google doc that we all have access to. This ensures that we all have clear answers from each member and without any misunderstandings. If we have completed our weeks' self-assigned feature, we take any available feature or keep working on the previous feature if needed.

Three important features got started last week, which I believe are the foundation of our app.
These are:

Layout: HTML, and CSS.
Responsiveness: Responsive layout to automatically adjust to mobile and larger screens.
Time: Showing current time.

We had a few roadblocks this past week in our Github workflow, but nothing serious. Mostly was us getting familiar with ZenHub, and our Pull Request steps process.

Week's Tasks and Features

Ming, who worked on the responsiveness feature, will continue to work the mobile responsiveness and the Team info popup modal to display at full screen. Also, Ming published our first sprint blog post.
Ola, was responsible on keeping everyone on track with MVP, and UX/UI tasks. Ola will take the Weather API and script feature to work in sprint 4.
Sophia Li, worked on the time feature and will take the Quotes feature.
I, RafaelDavish, worked on the HTML and CSS and will take on the Pomodoro feature.

My Experience

It's my first voyage, and my first time working with a remote team. I have to say, I am loving every minute of this Chingu Voyage 13. What I enjoyed the most is when we put our heads together to come out with the app idea. This process is exciting for me because I believe this is when my most creative ideas are born and I can imagine the possibilities.

Whats Next?

We have more features to work on for this app, things to fix, test and finally, the app deployment. I am looking forward to see the finished product. Next week is Thanksgiving, and I am definitely thankful for team Toucans 3!

*This blog post is written by Rafael Davis Hernandez and reviewed by Ola, Ming, and Sophia Li before publishing. Join us on our journey! Learn more by reading our voyage logs: sprint 1, sprint 2, sprint 4, sprint 5, sprint 6 🚀.