During our first sprint, our group was tasked with creating everything from scratch for this environment from the documentation to selecting the framework we were going to choose to proceed with. I was given the main tasks of assisting with the Read Me and trying to develop a working framework that was able to show IOS compatibility with React Native. The initial issue that we had was that most people in our group did not have a macbook and we needed to find a solution to developing on an ios device without the need of one. React eventually became our only solution and with it being able to project onto an ios device through expo and metro bundler. During this time we were able to assist one another achieve working react environment on everyone’s laptop.

Toward the end of our first sprint, we then proceeded to try and experiment with React where we stumbled upon another issue, and that was that we needed source code for everyone to work off of so that when merge our work together later on, it would work. Along with that, we now needed to think of the future so that students in the coming semesters would be able to work on that too. To be able to accomplish that, now we needed to create a synonymous docker file for everyone to use because many members of our group were working with different dependencies and now we needed to make it work so that not everyone has to go and download multiple things in order to get the code to work.

What worked well during our first sprint was our team chemistry and our ability to bounce ideas off one another as well as being able to assist each other with things we were stuck one. With a group that was able to communicate very well, we used class time to really try and move past any confusion regarding our project. It was also nice that no one judged one another and that we were able to openly express our ideas without any worries.

There was one thing that we lacked as a team the most and that was a sense of direction and urgency from time to time. Since our first sprint was primarily focused around picking the proper framework and most of the basic things of setting up our environment, it felt as though sometimes people didn’t know what to do due to the lack of work. I also believe that because this project was so new and no one was too sure about how things were supposed to go that maybe we were more worried about what we could achieve instead of what we couldn’t.

Individually, I felt as though I could have don’t more to put myself into contributing to things. There were times everyone was assigning things to themselves and I kind of put the groups priorities first instead of mine, and at times that felt as though I was not given enough to do. It also does feel like I am scared about trying to learn a new language and approach things I have not done before. I have the enthusiasm to go and try to learn things but also have the worry about possibly letting my team or myself down, and that might be a reason why I have not stepped up as much as I should.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Life as a CS Student by Dylan Nguyen and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.