Category Archives: CS@Worcester

First Sprint Retrospective

Last week, my team completed our first Sprint of the semester and presented our work to our professor and the client. Overall, as a team, we did a great job for having not done or been a part of a Sprint before. Each one of us was assigned an issue at the start of the Sprint to work on over the period. One of these issues was evaluating the frontends, so I reviewed each of them and found that two of them, AddInventory and CheckInventory, did not run properly. It was determined that it was a server/deployment issue, so I contacted a member of that team through private messages. The team was aware of the issue and were working on it, so I suggested to my team that we focus on the backend for this Sprint. However, we decided that it would be better if we try to fix it ourselves instead of waiting. So I was given the CheckInventory frontend. In class, another member was able to get the AddInventory frontend to run, so I asked for their help outside of class, where we determined that the frontend was unfinished. So my task for the next couple of weeks was to fix that, and I did so by comparing it to the AddInventory and CheckoutGuest frontends. I then “borrowed” files that were missing from my frontend, and edited and fixed ones that did exist. This consisted of organizing some files into new folders, copying over frontend-prod-build and frontend-dev-up commands, index.html file, and much more. After I got it to run, I edited it so that it would match the AddInventory frontend. After all of that, I committed, pushed and made a merge request. The pipelined failed with that, due to a yarn lock issue, so I fixed that, linted, and then committed and pushed again. 

What worked really well was communication between the team. I felt that whenever someone had an issue or needed something done, someone answered within the day, which is really good. I think the team chemistry was also really good too, it did not feel too serious but also not too laid back. We also helped each other whenever we could, which is good. On the personal side, what worked well for me was just working in general. Like this whole thing is something that I have not experienced before, so just being part of a team to get work done for someone else kind of gave me fuel to work and make this a good thing. However, something that did not work well for me was the expectation to get enough done. For each week we plan for something to get done, but every time for me, I felt like I did too little or not enough. Maybe it is something in my head, or I am setting the bar too high, but that ghost pressure was not nice. 

There is not a lot that I would say we can improve on as a team, mainly because our communication is good, the atmosphere is great, we help each other and we get things done. What we could do, just as a minor thing, is clarify what we are working on. Although I do not think this is an issue, it has been expressed by members of the team, so this can be a good way of getting some bearings. As an individual, what I can improve on is just getting more done. Although I did finish my part of the Sprint by the end of it, it did not feel enough to me, so going forward I want to do more. To go with that, I would like to be more open about what I did do, some of my teammates were not aware of what I did in some of the past weeks, so I would like to improve on.

The Apprenticeship pattern I have chosen that resonates with me this Sprint is “Confront your Ignorance,”  which is basically not knowing the information needed for the work at hand. I chose this one because it describes what happened to me during this Sprint. I realized very quickly that I did not understand many things in the frontend and the Inventory system overall, which was scary and discouraged me. If I had read about this pattern before the Sprint, I do not think much would have changed. I still would need to do a lot of research regardless.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Cao's Thoughts by antcao and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1 Retrospective

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/inventorybackend/-/merge_requests/60

This is my merge request for my finished task of implementing nodemon into InventoryBackend in order for developers to utilize hot-reloading and for the correct port to be added for the database.

For Sprint 1, what worked well for me as an individual was my experience with nodemon itself, and being able to incorporate that experience to get a head start on the issue. Although it took me longer than expected to complete the implementation, having some background knowledge allowed me to be more confident in the changes I was making. The familiarity of the subject gave me some peace-of-mind.  

As a team, what worked well for us was our communication skills and being supportive and helpful of each other during class time. We kept ourselves organized with our issues and our Issue Board, which allowed for a clearer understanding of the tasks at hand. Our in-class environment as a team was very open and transparent with our problems and what we’re working on. Our communication from within Discord improved over the course of the Sprint, and we were able to keep each other up to date whenever we ran into a problem, made a merge request, or needed a question answered. 

On an individual level, what didn’t work well was my silence at the beginning of the Sprint. I struggled with incorporating and fixing nodemon, but I wasn’t asking for help early enough. Once I did ask for help, I was able to make great progress thanks to the assistance of my teammates and Professor Wurst. As one of my teammates had noted, if I had asked for help sooner, I might have been able to finish my issue faster. 

On a team level, we did lack in communication here and there, such as a lack of response on Discord, or others not being included or involved as much as they could have been. The Issue Board was too vague from the beginning, which made it hard to choose our issues and perhaps led us to bite off more than we could chew.

To improve as a team, we should be narrowing down our Issues and specify them more clearly, so that our Issue Board and plan for the next Sprint is more refined and achievable. I think we should also start to do stand-ups at the beginning of each meeting to inform the team of what we’ve been working on and the status of our progress. Also, although this applies to mostly me, I think asking for help whenever we’re stuck would be a great improvement. 

To improve as an individual, I, as previously mentioned, should speak up when I am struggling to try and get assistance from my teammates. It’s always good to have alternate perspectives and fresh viewpoints, so someone else may see a problem or solution that I wasn’t seeing. I could do a better job at keeping up with my teammates’ work, as I sometimes don’t confidently, fully know what they’re currently working on. 

Although there are a few Apprenticeship Patterns that would apply to me, I’ve chosen to discuss “Retreat into Competence”. This pattern describes a situation where you are beginning to realize how much you don’t understand about the work you’re doing, what you’re expected to do, or even the work going on around you. It eventually becomes too overwhelming, and to fix it, you revisit your “comfort zone”; you involve yourself in your area of expertise to gain confidence back and to take a quick break. 

I selected this pattern because I often feel weighed-down by an overwhelming sense of ignorance from all of the languages, frameworks, and other factors of programming that I do not understand. It makes me lose confidence in my ability to code, as it emphasizes my weaknesses. In terms of this Sprint, although I chose an issue that I had a little bit of experience with, the roadblocks I hit made me realize how much I didn’t fully understand about nodemon and especially docker-compose files, connecting to databases, images, and the like. Finding my ignorance in these areas reduced my confidence in my ability to program and get this issue solved. 

If I had read the pattern before or during the Sprint, I would have stepped back, worked on something utilizing my strengths, and gained my confidence back. It’s good to remind yourself of what you’re capable of.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Josh's Coding Journey by joshuafife and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1 Retrospective

Gitlab activity:
https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/addinventoryfrontend/-/merge_requests/37

This was my first task I worked on during sprint 1. I updated AddInventoryPage.vue to match the design elements of Main.vue from CheckOutGuestFrontend to foster consistency in design layout.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/addinventoryfrontend/-/merge_requests/38

This merge request involved the refactoring of a few files so AddInventoryFrontend was able to load on port 5173 in the browser and connect to InventoryBackend, I submitted this merge request as an update on my work before the sprint 1 review, as complete implementation wasn’t done yet, the adjusted total weight of the inventory wasn’t working in this request.

These next two merge requests fix the issue of the previous one (adjusted total weight of the inventory is now being returned):
https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/inventorybackend/-/merge_requests/59
https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/addinventoryfrontend/-/merge_requests/39
There was an issue in InventoryBackend’s updateInventory.js file where the value was being returned incorrectly, so this was fixed and allowed the adjusted total weight of the inventory to be displayed in backend calls and in AddInventoryFrontend.

What worked really well in this sprint was the communication between all of the teammates. I acted as scrum master and there was no push back for getting work done. Everyone was able to work on their tasks independently and utilize teammates for help during class sessions. Discord was a big help in terms of ensuring we were keeping track of each other’s progress outside of class and was a good place to pose questions or ask for help. What didn’t work that well was the way in which we established goals for the sprint. This is our first one so it was to be expected, but going forward with sprints 2 and 3 we are aiming to establish more focused issues to work on. The goals of sprint 1 were too broad and made it feel as though not much progress was made even though we worked diligently.

Overall, as time goes on we continue to work better as a team. As a result, I don’t have many suggestions for improvement. However, establishing more focused goals as previously mentioned would improve our workflow, maintaining positive and consistent communication is obviously valued, and increasing how often we show each other what we’re working on are all things that can be considered. The biggest fault of our team is that sometimes teammates won’t really know what others are working on, even though they are contributing to the project. It’s important going forward to help visualize how everyone is contributing by ensuring there are consistent check-ins. Personally, since I’m still acting as scrum master, I should try to promote these check-ins myself instead of relying on teammates to initiate this. Having conversations going forward about who should be the scrum master, for how long, etc., is also something that I could mention. 

From Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye, the most prevalent pattern for this sprint may be “Expose Your Ignorance,” just today we were shown the value of this pattern. One of our team members was able to solve two separate issues that were preventing merge requests from being made. The basic idea of exposing your ignorance is that you’re showing those around you that you don’t necessarily know everything, you’re open to receiving help, and you want to learn throughout this process. Instead of feeling the need to appear competent, you are fostering a learning environment for everybody. I selected this pattern to mention because if we as a team were consistently exposing our ignorance, we could have potentially accomplished a lot more. Yes, individual work is important, but the hours spent on your own trying to fix an issue to no avail is not always worth appearing competent to your peers. If this pattern was read during the sprint, more questions could have been asked and answered, and more contributions to the project could have been made. 

From the blog CS@Worcester – Shawn In Tech by Shawn Budzinski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Introduction to Apprenticeship Patterns

            After reading the first chapter of Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman, my initial reaction was that the motivations and goals for this book were very admirable. The authors do not claim to have a correct path to becoming a successful developer.  Instead, they introduce an approachable and adaptable set of patterns that help you on your path through the stages of apprentice, journeyman, and master. They are establishing a mindset, a foundation for how you can become a better software developer. What made me admire the goals of the book were the implications of others using these patterns. If the community of developers adopts a craftsman mindset, it will improve the accessibility for new developers. More people would be open to learning from each other, sharing techniques, and uplifting the next generation of software developers.

            Since I have only read the first chapter and the introductions to others, my knowledge of the patterns is limited. From what I have read, the lessons you can learn from this book seem philosophical, which is a shift from how I would typically think about success in the software development field. I liked the book’s emphasis on self-reflection and seeing where you currently stand as a developer so you can see your path forward. The book discusses getting rid of pride or contentment in your current abilities so you do not restrict yourself from improving or learning from others. I can see myself and others falling into mediocrity with an incorrect mindset. It reminds me of advice I have heard that aligns with the metaphor of the big fish in a little pond. If you find yourself the biggest fish in the pond, you probably should not be there. Being content with your position will stifle your growth, so the idea is to constantly find yourself a bigger pond.

            The chapter that seems most relevant to me would be Perpetual Learning. The breadth and depth of my knowledge are at an early stage, so I am constantly learning new things to bolster my understanding and improve my skills. I am excited to learn and understand these patterns and hope that more developers will adopt them in the future.

Link to the book: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/apprenticeship-patterns/9780596806842/#toc-start

From the blog CS@Worcester – KindlCoding by jkindl and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1 Retrospective

What worked well this sprint was our division of roles and tasks as well as the planning for tasks and the sprint as a whole. Each member had a specific section of our project that we worked on, some even taking part  in more or most of the project, as well as connecting the pieces of the project. I think we spent a lot of time planning and working out what we need to do, the path we want to take, and the many decisions along the way. This hopefully led to less confusion while working through the sprint. 

What didn’t work so well this sprint was the communication. Communication during certain moments in the sprint was lackluster and thus other members didn’t know what certain members were up to or working on. This also led to those other members having to pick up work had the certain member not done their work within a specific time.

To improve as a team, I think we should communicate more. Specifically, what we’re working on, what we can and can’t do, if we need help, and to complete tasks that require more than one member. As we move towards a complete product, I think the work may become more complicated and the communication will be necessary to connect and join respective pieces of the project.

To improve as an individual, I need to communicate more and stay on top of my work. Putting in more effort to communicate with my teammates and completing my tasks should be my number one priority. Personal issues, lack of effort, or lack of understanding led to me not being able to complete my tasks. Not only is that quite the issue, but I didn’t communicate any of that to my team at all, and thus they have no idea what I’m up to and have to pick up the work that I didn’t do. 

The apprenticeship pattern I felt was most relevant to my experiences was “Expose Your Ignorance” from Chapter 2. This pattern states that there are people depending on you to know what you are doing and need confidence that you can deliver. The solution to this pattern says to “Show the people who are depending on you that the learning process is part of delivering software [… and that the …] most obvious way to expose your ignorance is to ask questions.” I felt that this pattern partly describes what I experienced during this sprint. There are people relying on me to do my part but I don’t have the confidence in my ability and am unfamiliar with a lot of the processes that we will work through. My teammates, on the other hand, are very familiar with the processes or are very willing to learn. 

Although I did expose my ignorance and ask questions of some of my teammates who were much more experienced than I am, I could have done so much earlier. Not only that, but I still feel hesitant to ask questions because there are plenty of things I should already know but don’t. Reading this pattern may have encouraged me to ask questions more often and much earlier in the sprint, increasing communication from myself and between teammates, and would hopefully lead to me knowing what I need to know to tackle my tasks.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kyler's Blog by kylerlai and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1 Retrospective

The first sprint was a productive as well as eye-opening experience. This is the first sprint and set of work that we completed as a team during this capstone. The first sprint was able to teach us how to effectively and efficiently spread out the work, ask questions between each other for collaboration as well as knowing when to go to outside sources such as other teams or the professor. In our first sprint, the work revolved mainly around creating a new field for the guest object that would be able to store the value of the date of first entry. This one task was able to be split up into different working portions. These included adding this field to the API, the back end and the front end. Besides the main task we also completed the tasks of mounting a volume to the docker container allowing data to persist even after rebuilding as well as working on a CORS issue prohibiting the back end from communicating with the front end.

This is where things started with working well. Sean was working on the back end while Hiercine was working on the API, since they shared the same subsystem they were able to collaborate to solve the problem together. This was also scene with Lynn working on the front end and Winston fixing the CORS issue they both had experience with the front end so they were also able to collaborate. This is one of our biggest strength is our team working abilities and being able to collaborate to make the work flow more effectively and efficiently. Next, are the things that didn’t work well. I believe that everything we did was to the best of our abilities. The only things that could be commented on as not working well is our lack of knowledge in certain areas. For example, not knowing exactly how certain systems worked within the code since it was our first experience with it. In addition, when it came to linting issues, one linter was for commit messages which we recently learned how to make proper messages so we had to learn how to make them after causing the linter to fail.

I believe as a team we are in a very good spot that cam only go up. I think as a team we can work at continuing to learn more about the systems and tools being used. In addition, I believe when it comes to merge requests we can be more efficient in making sure all work gets merged in a timely manner and we all collaboratively spread out the merging work. As a individual, I believe I can improve on learning more about the code so I understand more what is happening so I can make better solutions for the issues at hand. I also believe I can work more at improving how I collaborate within the team.

The pattern I selected was “Rubbing Elbows”, I chose this because I felt it related very well to how we worked as a team. Even though we all had our own assigned issues, we were able to find commonalities between them allowing us to work together to increase efficiency and find solutions that we would not be able to find on our own. The “Rubbing Elbows” pattern is knowing when to seek collaboration and being able to learn from those you are working with. I don’t think reading this prior to the sprint would change anything since we already were collaborating.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/issues/139
https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfofrontend/-/issues/107

https://gitlab.com/groups/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/-/epics/56

From the blog CS@Worcester – Giovanni Casiano – Software Development by Giovanni Casiano and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1# Retrospective

 Hello!

 

This week marks the first week of sprint 2 proper, and as such I’ve been tasked with writing about my experiences with sprint 1.

First of all, I implemented RabbitMQ on the inventory backend, which took a while for me to accomplish simply because most of what we are doing in this class is so new to me. I’ll have a link to the merge request at the bottom of the page.

I think our group functioned pretty well during our class meetings, there isn’t that much I would change really. We were productive, everyone was super open to helping each other solve problems, and we laid out the plans for the sprint pretty effectively. 

I think in terms of things that didn’t go very well, I was having a ridiculous amount of problems setting up Visual Studio, and making the backend work. I should be through most of the problems now, (in theory), but during most of the setup process I was unable to build any of the frontends or the backends, which completely halted any progress I could have made early on, though it did give me a chance to read some documentation, and familiarize myself with the backend, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad.

Some things I need to work on going forward is my time management skills, as near the end of the sprint I was rushing to make all of my code work, which was very stressful. Had I managed my time better, this wouldn’t have happened, and going forward I am going to work on improving how I spend my time this sprint. 

Some things that we could work on as a group though, and even now I’m still seeing parts of this problem at the outset of sprint 2, is the fact that not everyone is checking the discord consistently, myself included. Part of the reason why I was so hesitant to join in on discussions in the discord chat was because I was everyone seemed like they already knew what they were doing, and I felt a little silly with some of the problems I was having. I am actively trying to do better, and I am regularly checking the discord and trying to vocalize my questions, but not everyone is online all the time, which makes getting them answered in a timely fashion difficult.

As for which apprenticeship pattern most aligned with this sprint, I would have to say the white belt is pretty spot on. While the context isn’t super relevant (I don’t think anyone called on my expertise), I was pretty consistently facing the problem on educating myself about RabbitMQ and Javascript, both of which I have no prior experience with. Not to mention I was almost in denial about my lack of learning, and for any trouble I was having, the blame was placed on the course load, not me, which isn’t very true. The white belt apprenticeship pattern centers around being willing to unlearn old skills if they are stopping you from effectively learning new ones, which I think was pretty relevant during this sprint. While I don’t think I would have unlearned all of my experience in Java had I read this pattern during the sprint, I think it would have tempered my expectations as to how quickly and easily I would be learning new skills. Learning Java was fairly pain free, but being under a time crunch and being forced to learn a bunch of new skills, it certainly would have been nice to have some idea of how the learning process was going to go.

 

As promised, here is the merge request I generated for this sprint:

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/inventorybackend/-/merge_requests/58

 

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1# Retrospective

 Hello!

 

This week marks the first week of sprint 2 proper, and as such I’ve been tasked with writing about my experiences with sprint 1.

First of all, I implemented RabbitMQ on the inventory backend, which took a while for me to accomplish simply because most of what we are doing in this class is so new to me. I’ll have a link to the merge request at the bottom of the page.

I think our group functioned pretty well during our class meetings, there isn’t that much I would change really. We were productive, everyone was super open to helping each other solve problems, and we laid out the plans for the sprint pretty effectively. 

I think in terms of things that didn’t go very well, I was having a ridiculous amount of problems setting up Visual Studio, and making the backend work. I should be through most of the problems now, (in theory), but during most of the setup process I was unable to build any of the frontends or the backends, which completely halted any progress I could have made early on, though it did give me a chance to read some documentation, and familiarize myself with the backend, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad.

Some things I need to work on going forward is my time management skills, as near the end of the sprint I was rushing to make all of my code work, which was very stressful. Had I managed my time better, this wouldn’t have happened, and going forward I am going to work on improving how I spend my time this sprint. 

Some things that we could work on as a group though, and even now I’m still seeing parts of this problem at the outset of sprint 2, is the fact that not everyone is checking the discord consistently, myself included. Part of the reason why I was so hesitant to join in on discussions in the discord chat was because I was everyone seemed like they already knew what they were doing, and I felt a little silly with some of the problems I was having. I am actively trying to do better, and I am regularly checking the discord and trying to vocalize my questions, but not everyone is online all the time, which makes getting them answered in a timely fashion difficult.

As for which apprenticeship pattern most aligned with this sprint, I would have to say the white belt is pretty spot on. While the context isn’t super relevant (I don’t think anyone called on my expertise), I was pretty consistently facing the problem on educating myself about RabbitMQ and Javascript, both of which I have no prior experience with. Not to mention I was almost in denial about my lack of learning, and for any trouble I was having, the blame was placed on the course load, not me, which isn’t very true. The white belt apprenticeship pattern centers around being willing to unlearn old skills if they are stopping you from effectively learning new ones, which I think was pretty relevant during this sprint. While I don’t think I would have unlearned all of my experience in Java had I read this pattern during the sprint, I think it would have tempered my expectations as to how quickly and easily I would be learning new skills. Learning Java was fairly pain free, but being under a time crunch and being forced to learn a bunch of new skills, it certainly would have been nice to have some idea of how the learning process was going to go.

 

As promised, here is the merge request I generated for this sprint:

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/inventorybackend/-/merge_requests/58

 

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1# Retrospective

 Hello!

 

This week marks the first week of sprint 2 proper, and as such I’ve been tasked with writing about my experiences with sprint 1.

First of all, I implemented RabbitMQ on the inventory backend, which took a while for me to accomplish simply because most of what we are doing in this class is so new to me. I’ll have a link to the merge request at the bottom of the page.

I think our group functioned pretty well during our class meetings, there isn’t that much I would change really. We were productive, everyone was super open to helping each other solve problems, and we laid out the plans for the sprint pretty effectively. 

I think in terms of things that didn’t go very well, I was having a ridiculous amount of problems setting up Visual Studio, and making the backend work. I should be through most of the problems now, (in theory), but during most of the setup process I was unable to build any of the frontends or the backends, which completely halted any progress I could have made early on, though it did give me a chance to read some documentation, and familiarize myself with the backend, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad.

Some things I need to work on going forward is my time management skills, as near the end of the sprint I was rushing to make all of my code work, which was very stressful. Had I managed my time better, this wouldn’t have happened, and going forward I am going to work on improving how I spend my time this sprint. 

Some things that we could work on as a group though, and even now I’m still seeing parts of this problem at the outset of sprint 2, is the fact that not everyone is checking the discord consistently, myself included. Part of the reason why I was so hesitant to join in on discussions in the discord chat was because I was everyone seemed like they already knew what they were doing, and I felt a little silly with some of the problems I was having. I am actively trying to do better, and I am regularly checking the discord and trying to vocalize my questions, but not everyone is online all the time, which makes getting them answered in a timely fashion difficult.

As for which apprenticeship pattern most aligned with this sprint, I would have to say the white belt is pretty spot on. While the context isn’t super relevant (I don’t think anyone called on my expertise), I was pretty consistently facing the problem on educating myself about RabbitMQ and Javascript, both of which I have no prior experience with. Not to mention I was almost in denial about my lack of learning, and for any trouble I was having, the blame was placed on the course load, not me, which isn’t very true. The white belt apprenticeship pattern centers around being willing to unlearn old skills if they are stopping you from effectively learning new ones, which I think was pretty relevant during this sprint. While I don’t think I would have unlearned all of my experience in Java had I read this pattern during the sprint, I think it would have tempered my expectations as to how quickly and easily I would be learning new skills. Learning Java was fairly pain free, but being under a time crunch and being forced to learn a bunch of new skills, it certainly would have been nice to have some idea of how the learning process was going to go.

 

As promised, here is the merge request I generated for this sprint:

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/inventorybackend/-/merge_requests/58

 

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 1# Retrospective

 Hello!

 

This week marks the first week of sprint 2 proper, and as such I’ve been tasked with writing about my experiences with sprint 1.

First of all, I implemented RabbitMQ on the inventory backend, which took a while for me to accomplish simply because most of what we are doing in this class is so new to me. I’ll have a link to the merge request at the bottom of the page.

I think our group functioned pretty well during our class meetings, there isn’t that much I would change really. We were productive, everyone was super open to helping each other solve problems, and we laid out the plans for the sprint pretty effectively. 

I think in terms of things that didn’t go very well, I was having a ridiculous amount of problems setting up Visual Studio, and making the backend work. I should be through most of the problems now, (in theory), but during most of the setup process I was unable to build any of the frontends or the backends, which completely halted any progress I could have made early on, though it did give me a chance to read some documentation, and familiarize myself with the backend, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad.

Some things I need to work on going forward is my time management skills, as near the end of the sprint I was rushing to make all of my code work, which was very stressful. Had I managed my time better, this wouldn’t have happened, and going forward I am going to work on improving how I spend my time this sprint. 

Some things that we could work on as a group though, and even now I’m still seeing parts of this problem at the outset of sprint 2, is the fact that not everyone is checking the discord consistently, myself included. Part of the reason why I was so hesitant to join in on discussions in the discord chat was because I was everyone seemed like they already knew what they were doing, and I felt a little silly with some of the problems I was having. I am actively trying to do better, and I am regularly checking the discord and trying to vocalize my questions, but not everyone is online all the time, which makes getting them answered in a timely fashion difficult.

As for which apprenticeship pattern most aligned with this sprint, I would have to say the white belt is pretty spot on. While the context isn’t super relevant (I don’t think anyone called on my expertise), I was pretty consistently facing the problem on educating myself about RabbitMQ and Javascript, both of which I have no prior experience with. Not to mention I was almost in denial about my lack of learning, and for any trouble I was having, the blame was placed on the course load, not me, which isn’t very true. The white belt apprenticeship pattern centers around being willing to unlearn old skills if they are stopping you from effectively learning new ones, which I think was pretty relevant during this sprint. While I don’t think I would have unlearned all of my experience in Java had I read this pattern during the sprint, I think it would have tempered my expectations as to how quickly and easily I would be learning new skills. Learning Java was fairly pain free, but being under a time crunch and being forced to learn a bunch of new skills, it certainly would have been nice to have some idea of how the learning process was going to go.

 

As promised, here is the merge request I generated for this sprint:

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/inventorysystem-weight-based/inventorybackend/-/merge_requests/58

 

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.