Yesterday, we started our final projects. Everyone made their pitches at 2pm, and afterwards, we voted for what projects we wanted to work on. It took two rounds of voting, but in the end, it came down to four projects, each worked on by teams of four.

My group and I immediately rushed to one of the rooms and claimed it. This room is named “Object”, and it’s not much, but we’re going to be in here a lot for the next week…

object room sign

Our pending project title is “Kindling” - even though that name’s already taken. We’re actually struggling a lot with coming up with an original name! Our team of four is: Dave Kerr, Judy Jow, Raghav Malik, and myself.

Dave is our project manager since he pitched the idea. The first thing we did was ask our project manager what his vision for our product was. Frankly, I was still not clear what the app was supposed to do since I don’t own a Kindle.

Afterwards, I was compelled to tell everyone what my ideal final project was, the standard and workflow I wanted us to have, what I thought previous final projects we had seen lacked, and what I thought we could learn/take from previous final projects.

The brief version of it was: I think following good git workflow, documenting code a lot, following good preset conventions, and just standardizing everything we do among each other, will make all our lives much easier.

To me, someone who is organized and conscious of passing code to teammates is much more valuable than someone technically gifted and pushes code quickly. Besides, I already believe everyone in our team is really smart. Some standards I hope we can follow this next week includes: adding comments to any methods longer than 5 lines, writing tests for everything, making sure all the tests pass before pushing a branch, making sure you have a complete feature before making a pull request. Judy also proposed we code review everything before we merge it to follow industry standards.

I really like that everyone in my team wants to hold ourselves to a high standard and make professional grade code. What I think we can learn from previous final projects is that rather than stretching ourselves too far technically and trying to too add many features, focus on the MVP of our product and making it run extremely crisply and efficiently. I mean, there will be a lot of technical functionalities we’ll be implementing regardless, but I’d like us to put a lot of focus on design and user experience. Then, refactor the code to make it really modular, so we can extend on it in the future with ease.

WELL, that was a long rant. Anyway, Sam and Rebecca came in eventually and gave us a short talk. We elected our team lead, Judy, who we clearly all respect. Next we did a mini-EE (engineer empathy) exercise, where we took turns standing in the middle of a circle and hearing from everyone: “I trust and want to work with you because… and I trust and would want to work with you more if…” It was really pleasant hearing everyone’s trust in each other, and maybe I’ll go into what we all told each other someday.

After that, we finally got to doing some real work! The first thing we did was spend a long time writing user stories and wireframing our site. It was a little tricky because we wanted a lot of nice design elements. We wanted our page to be really responsive and AJAX-ified, but also produce URLs to our users so they can share a certain page. Ultimately we came up with something like this…

wireframe

We took a break for dinner. I got a brisket bowl from Tres Carnes. :) The last thing we did before calling it a day was design our schemas.

schema sqldesigner

We didn’t code much yet, but I think we’ve set ourselves up well to get rolling today.