Rollercoaster rails

Part 2 of project week underway and the general mood is one of optimism within the camp. After a challenging first week getting to grips with Rails and learning more about the general structure of how it operates, everybody is now feeling a bit more confident with the new web framework. We were predicting a much smoother ride after a bumpy introduction to Rails, with Rails creating so much of the structure, all we needed to understand in greater depth the functionality we required and where to write the code. I was especially keen on getting some diagramming done so we could have all have a better idea of the overall picture of how the app would function along with the relationships between the tables.

The group functioned in a very fluid manner, help was offered where required at short notice which was a plus working together. There was much less emphasis on mobbing together for ideas, the routine implemented everyday with morning and afternoon standups allowed everybody to get a good gauge on mood levels along with keeping each other up to date on what we were working on. We did end up running into a few database issues which did hold us up. As all our code was identical due to strict merging and pulling protocols the issues did leave us stumped. Thankfully asking for assistance from other members of the cohort managed to remedy our problem.

For the front end we experimented with using bootstrap, from my understanding all the css would be inside a single file but as I didn’t personally work on the visual element of the application I’m not 100% certain. I had a more vested interest in the database backend portion and understanding how Rails simplifies the retrieval and writing of data. Connecting up the tables took us a surprising amount of time to execute as none of us had real experience working with multiple tables it really slowed down the progress we could make. For the front-end I mentioned the team would use bootstrap and there was issues associated with this as many lines of css that were imported that weren’t syncing properly with what we had so far.

Everybody felt quite drained towards the end of the week and we were all looking forward to our first weekend without a weekend project. I’ve learnt a lot about Rails and look forward to going through the codebase in more detail armed with a greater knowledge of connecting tables together in the database. Our app deployment was also frought with errors and I’m keen to host my first app on heroku but it wasn’t to be for this project. What was interesting is that we also had to switch team roles every sprint, of all the team roles the one I enjoyed the most was the challenger, coming up with different solutions to our approach and ways of thinking.

Time for a well deserved break me thinks!