Fifth week at Makers Academy

Week five is over, and what a week it has been!

I will start by saying that this week was our first group-project. An entire new experience for which I felt a mixture of excitement, curiosity and insecurity. My time at uni had taught me that group-projects could make for a very enjoyable time or a quite a miserable one, depending, mainly, on who you are put with and what you need to do.

I consider myself lucky that all of my cohort (at least the ones I knew from working from the office, as some people are fully remote and I have never seen them or spoke to them) are lovely humans.

The coach made it very clear that the objective of this week was not to complete the project, but to learn how to work in a group, plan, organise and divide the work and be on the same page about what our MVP (minimal viable product) is and what our “sprints” will entail. Basically, we were given a lot of specifications to make an Airbnb clone, but that didn’t mean they expected us to meet all those specifications. The challenge was in being realistic about how much we could get done in 2, 4 and 5 days (that was the length of our sprints) and try to create tickets little by little depending on how far we were getting.

When they let us know our project mates, I was both a little sad that I didn’t get to work with some of my favourite people, but also quite glad that two of my group-mates seemed super cheerful people and the other person I had already paired with and it had been a very positive experience.

On our first day, we were asked to give our group a name and decide together what our goals, principles and boundaries were going to be. I threw in the idea of using “platypus” as our safe word for when someone was feeling fed-up or overwhelmed, and although we never actually used it, it was a good laugh.

Then, we moved on to the planning phase, where we designed our project. We used an online tool called “excalidraw”, that allows you to draw and write easily on an online board. I think my colleagues appreciated that I had been the only one finishing the weekend project from the week before, and I still had in my head the skeleton of what we needed to build, the order in which things had to be done, how the different views worked with the app and so on. It took us several hours, but we got a pretty solid plan of what we were going to create and how.

We paired two and two and started by working on the four main classes of our project. So far so good. The problem arrived afterwards, when we had to move on to the next step. Then my pair started focusing on the back-end (as I had a little more experience with it) and the other pair with the front-end (as one of them was quite keen on it and was pretty good at it). I started getting a bit bored when I realised that I had to do the exact same thing I had been doing over the weekend, but it would have been alright if it wasn’t because we got stuck for 4 hours straight and didn’t manage to get much done. I had been sleeping pretty badly that week, and I had the feeling it would likely be a very silly bug that I just didn’t have the concentration to see. We only had coaches available in the mornings, so there wasn’t anyone to ask.

The following day, the coach helped us get unstuck (and yes, it was something quite basic and silly), and we carried on with our work. But of course, as soon as we got to the afternoon, we got stuck again. We were using Sinatra for this project, and the error message we were getting said that one of the methods we were using couldn’t be found. It didn’t make any sense, we checked our spelling, we checked that we were requiring the right files, we checked everything. My pair was lovely, but he also didn’t have a clue of what was going on, and you could see that the whole team was feeling quite down. I also felt sorry that he had to deal with my grumpiness that day, as I was starting to loose my patience for pairing when we were just hitting our head against the screen for several hours. By the time the day was over, I was feeling extremely tired, frustrated and de-motivated.

As my fantastic mentor mentioned a few days later, dividing the job in “back-end” and “front-end” hadn’t been a good idea and it is something I will bear in mind for next time. She said it was way more enjoyable when you get to do a bit of everything, as making a site look pretty is a bit less mentally intense and more creative than building all the structure of it, and it is good as well that we all learn to do both. That was one of the takeaways, better organisation and creation of small, easy and quick tickets.

On Monday, some other devs and I had a meeting with one of the coaches to talk about our experience with the hybrid course and give some feedback.

We all agreed that we weren’t getting that feeling of community and of a bootcamp as much as we expected, and the communication regarding dates we needed to be in and such hadn’t been great, especially when we found out that we could be in as much as we wanted rather than being asked to be in on particular weeks. It was a very constructive chat and we all appreciated that someone took the time to talk to us and that they were trying to improve everyone’s experience.

On Tuesday afternoon I had a session with Dana, our wellbeing coach. It was my first session and I didn’t have any particular concerns at the time, but I thought it would be interesting to explore the topic of empathy that she had discussed in our last workshop a bit more. It was not a comfortable session as it usually happens when someone is let into the deep corners of your mind, there were lots of questions asked, a lot of introspection and finding answers. Although it was only a half an hour session, I felt like it was enough time for a good introduction to this sessions, and decided to book another one for next week. At the point of writing this, I think I am going to have quite a bit to talk about by then.

I spent the entirety of my Wednesday just wanting to cry in a corner, and that’s kind of what I did when I got home. A good cry and a vent with one of my best friends whom I was staying with. I realised I had been needing that for a couple of days already, and just pushed through because I thought it would be the best. I was starting to doubt I could ever become a software developer, I didn’t want to go back to the office, I just wanted to rest. Truth is, that night I finally had some proper sleep, and the following day I woke-up with a much more positive attitude, and knowing that whatever that day would be like, I would be able to deal with it and enjoy it.

On Thursday, when I arrived to the office much better rested and happy, everything seemed to suddenly work. After spending four hours stuck on something the day before, it only took me about half an hour to debug all my code and get it running. When my colleagues arrived, we had most of our MVP covered and I suddenly felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

At lunchtime, I went with some of my course-mates to a fantastic vegan restaurant called “Unity diner”, and I tried what was some of the best imitations of animal products ever. I order some nice calamari rings, fish squares and padron peppers with feta cheese and chorizo. If I hadn’t known they were vegan, I would’ve probably thought they weren’t. It was a very nice lunch and a good reward for making it until the end of the week.

That evening, we didn’t get much done. We didn’t have the time to implement any new features, so we put our energy towards finishing what we already had and make it look pretty. We took a break at some point to just go for a little walk all together. It had been a difficult week, but I was glad I got to share it with such kind people.

At the end of the day, most of the people of my cohort that were working on-site went to a pub to have a couple of drinks before going back home and I joined. It was a nice way of unwinding and we all had a nice chat.

It was my last day of the week in London, so after that I made my way back to Bournemouth. On the Friday, we started a video call to discuss what we were going to do that day, and decided that we still didn’t have the time to make anything new, so we recorded ourselves presenting the project that we had done. I wasn’t particularly happy with my part of the presentation, but I tend to get slightly nervous when I have to present, so I thought that was probably as good as it was going to get, and everything else was pretty good, even if we forgot to mention our security features (like requested patterns on our form fields and such). The rest of our morning was well spent on chatting and doing some late team building.

In the afternoon, I had to go on a car journey to Bristol for a gig as part of my partner’s birthday celebration. So I hooked into his phone’s WIFI, adjusted my seatbelt and dialled-in for the project presentations. I got a few comments on the line of “That’s dedication, Patricia!”, and was quite happy with the few signal issues encountered during the journey.

Those few hours were some of my favourite moments of the week. There were four groups presenting their work, including us, and I think the other 1 or 2, that had been working mainly remotely, decided not to present. The first two groups that presented had done an amazing job, both on the front-end and back-end aspects as well as in making it entertaining and fun. The third group had also had a fun approach of making a “cheap” version of AirBnb, but unfortunately run into lots of different bugs during their presentation. Then, it was our turn, and instead of a live demo, we played the video that we had recorded in the morning, which you can see too:

When I was watching our video with the rest of our cohort, I realised it was very clear that we had worked hard and also had fun while doing it. You could see we worked as a team and wanted everyone to have their part in the presentation. I was very proud of our team and what we had achieved in only a week’s worth, and glad to have had that experience, even if It was hard at times.

After the presentations, a person from my group and other student hosted the retrospective. It was great fun to read all the messages of people having enjoyed working together, the difficulties they had encountered and how they were planning to improve them next time. It was the best possible way of finishing such an intense but enjoyable week.

What did I learn?

• That working in a group can be both very fun and very challenging. You have to make sure you don’t put on your shoulders more work and pressure than you are expected or that it’s fair to. It is very easy sometimes to think that the whole weight of the project is on you, but actually, if things don’t go as well as you hoped, that’s a share responsibility. And the same happens if they go amazingly well.

• It is also very important to make sure everyone feels comfortable and listened to, and good communication, as usual, is one of the most useful tools we can use. Take the time to get to know your project-mates, take breaks together and have a chat about things that are not coding. Once you get to know them, pairing and communication will become much more natural.

• The value of having a project manager to distribute the work appropriately. It is so easy to underestimate the amount of work that you need to do and how much more it will take to do it when you are working within a team and everyone is trying to learn how to do so. Make lots of very, very small tickets and celebrate every achievement, no matter how tiny it is. Make sure everyone is able to do a bit of everything, no matter if someone in the team is great or totally sucks at it. It is important to learn and not get stuck with a particular part of the project for too long if not needed.

• Make sure your minimum viable product is reasonable, and always aim for less than you think you can get done in the given time. Problems and bugs will happen, you will get frustrated, and having something you can easily achieve in the first sprint will boost everyone’s motivation. There will always be time to add more features later on.

• It is ok not to be ok. It is fine if you don’t feel super cheerful every single day. It is normal to not be as talkative as others. It is alright to get frustrated or grumpy, as long as you communicate it to your team so that a solution or the appropriate support can be procured. We are not perfect, we are flawed and emotional beings and life happens around us and affect us in innumerable different ways, but we have the choice to help each other through it and make the team a safe space to talk and work at.