Weeknotes - 08 Makers

Group Project part 1

Scrum

We tried Kanban a couple of weeks ago, time to try Scrum! A big difference between these two agile methods is working in sprints. This means you estimate the complexity of job tickets in the backlog, and select tickets to work on for the sprint period (considering the teams velocity and the complexity of the task). Typical meetings like stand-ups and retros in scrum are referred to as ceremonies.

Our approach to Scrum

We used Trello to organise our tickets, with each feature on it's own branch in git and github.
We held stand ups twice a day (this had been working well for previous projects). At the end of each sprint we held a retro to demo team achievements and reflect on how we would improve the next sprint. We worked with a Product Owner (one of the coaches) to review our completed features - this would likely happen in staging in the real world, but for us this took place in Production (which meant Travis CI could prompt Heroku to automatically deploy code from the master branch!).

Projects

This week we were building a Facebook clone in a team, over two weeks, in Rails. This was our first week looking at the Ruby on Rails framework, and it was an eye-opener - Rails can essentially do everything we'd learned in the first 4 weeks in a few commands from the terminal. Having Learned Ruby first and having looked at app design, the huge file tree was more familiar than it could have been, but 5 days in there's a lot that remains a mystery (it's magic). The weekend challenge was to build an Instagram clone in rails, and although I spent too much time upfront planning, and not enough time testing, I have a working app which was built relatively quickly!

Misc.

💉 Impromptu escape rooms are a fun time!

👏 Great to see the cohort above demonstrating their great final projects

🐸 Had fun playing with CSS Grids and Flexbox

Comments

[Chris James]

We worked with a Product Owner (one of the coaches) to review our completed features - this would likely happen in staging in the real world, but for us this took place in Production

Likely but not ideal! Way better to demo stuff in prod if possible.

If you need sign-off before exposing to "real" users you can invest some time in feature toggles.

[ruthmoog]

Thanks Chris, not heard of feature toggles before, so I looked up this article:
martinfowler.com/articles/feature-...