#Week 5 — Group Chat
Here we are in Week 5 of the Makers Academy coding bootcamp and there is a change this week, undergoing our first group engineering project! Specifically, when given a specification, can we as a team create an Airbnb clone that allows you to sign up; log in; book a space and upload a space for a user to book.
This is not just some normal pair session in the afternoon. We, as a group of five, have to create our own user stories based on how we understand the specification, and work as a team to create a somewhat viable project, combining what we have learnt from the previous weeks and having synergy with no walkthrough or assistance.
I really enjoyed the task because it was a great opportunity to connect and learn from my peers, because everyone’s skills and experiences are different. Our group was really good especially because everyone could contribute to the project, whether it was those adding their expertise to make our website look really clean due to their knowledge of HTML/CSS, or myself with my approach to making sure the TDD is in place whenever we want to add a solution.
I’ve mentioned before that I can understand why a lot of people would skip focusing on TDD when you feel that you have a limited deadline to have a product ready, or even a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) ready. Because it can be time-consuming, and sometimes might not seem worth the effort initially, but when you have many different elements working together like multiple databases in the program, it can very helpful in making sure that what you are coding is making sense.
The beginning of the task was a bit awkward at first, because it is hard to determine what to begin with and also dividend what everyone would be doing. Are you going solo? Whose responsible for the databases? Who knows how to handle the routing or the HTML/CSS? Which is why communication is very important and having a system to keep track on responsibilities.
We used a Trello board, which is an online interactive board to where you can create and assign tasks to individuals. As you can see from the image above, our tasks was to create user stories, then we’ll choose on which user story to work on for the day to achieve and add to the main program. And with git collaboration, we’ll create new branches to make sure that we’re working our code away from the main branch, then when we have worked out a solution to our user story, request a pull request on GitHub and when there are no conflicts, merge our contribution like a fine symphony!
Please check out our repo to see for yourself each or our contributions and our finished code. Shout out to Frank, Jenny, Fabio and Camilla for the amazing work and support with our first group project!
