I did the bulk of the work for this sprint in one sitting. I haven’t really figured out whether I think this was a good idea or not. On one hand, changing gears is something I’m not great at and I try to minimize it as much as I can. On the other hand, I wound up being pretty burnt out on the project.
Here’s the first issue I completed. “Learning RabbitMQ” is kind of an ephemeral goal, so I decided to only look into what I consider to be the bare minimum of what we will actually need, which is essentially just the ability to put messages in the queue and take them out of the queue. I feel like I know enough about it to work with it and help get other people up to speed.
I’m sticking these issues together because I wound up having to do them at the same time. To refactor things in the backend, I had to at least make sure it ran without errors, and to do that I needed to sort out the dependencies so that everything being imported at the top of index.js was either removed or installed.
It wasn’t until after I finished doing all this that I remembered someone had already modified the backend server to get it to work, only on a different branch. While that kind of tunnel vision is generally a bad thing in my opinion, doing all this work enabled me to actually understand how this project works. Specifically, I had a breakthrough in understanding that the server is actually just a program with its entry point being the index.js file. My previous experience with web development lead me to believe that the actual flow of the program logic was obscured behind all kinds of layers of indirection and it is in my opinion a little embarrassing that I didn’t see sooner that that was not the case.
Finally, I deleted a directory containing a project from the previous developers that they were using to mess around with RabbitMQ. Not much else to say about that.
I also considered tackling the issue I wrote before about updating the documentation for every project, but I decided against it. Apart from being a little burnt out, I also figured that it’d probably be better to put it off as long as possible so that whoever tackles it can go into it with as much knowledge as possible.
Individually, I think my main issue is just a matter of setting aside time for this project. As a team, I think our biggest problem is the granularity of our issues, although it’s somewhat necessary considering our experience level and the nature of the project. While I struggle to put the work in, I don’t think the team as a whole has this problem.
All that being said, I am kind of excited about this project now. I was initially skeptical of my ability to contribute to this project, but now I feel like I actually sort of know what I’m doing
From the blog CS@Worcester – Tom's Blog by Thomas Clifford and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.