My first Sprint Retrospective experience overall truly has been great. Being introduced to a new team environment is different every time, I did not really know what to expect. I had a specific mindset going into this one particularly. I wanted to know, where will I fit in best? I wanted to know the best ways I could assist my team in tackling this project. My teammates made this process very easy. They are intelligent and very ambitious about our project. They were very open about their strong suits and what topics they thought they might not feel as strong in. It allowed us to fill in those gaps and get everyone on the same page. I learn a lot from them.
List of my major contributions to GitLab:
Issue Title: Basics of Keycloak.
Issue Link: https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/identity-and-access-management-system/keycloak-research/-/issues/1
Issue Title: Gateway/Ingress. Once requests are past it, are all communications considered secure?
Issue Link: https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/identity-and-access-management-system/general/-/issues/4
It’s been a very fluid experience so far teamwise most definitely. My individual performance is a different story. I need to make a conscious effort to change the some of the ways I approach things the next Sprint. I created 13 out of 44 issues created. I undercalculated the weight on many of those issues. And instead of continuing to build those issues into smaller ones, I just kept trying to take the heavy issue head on. This put me in many inconclusive rabbit holes. Instead of confusing my teammates with information that is still very new to me, I just kept reading in hopes that something would suddenly click for me and I could produce a confident result. I will link an example of one of the issues I am referring to.
Research: Deploying Keycloak on AWS Kubernetes: https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/identity-and-access-management-system/general/-/issues/5
Another issue I struggled with was the Gateway/Ingress Research Issue I completed. I spent an incredible amount of time creating that research writeup. Which I personally don’t feel confident on it. I am not sure it is tutorial we will even be following. But I think that it is a good start to grasp the concept of what we will be working on. Another one of my struggles was that I didn’t prioritize Keycloak. I completed my Gateway/Ingress research before I attempted to secure my first NodeJS App with Keycloak versus a Standalone version. Which the Standalone version does not promote a strong understanding of Keycloak versus securing a NodeJS app.
Aside from my self criticisms. I feel very confident heading into our next Sprint. I really am finally starting to feel that confidence behind my understanding of these concepts. It was relieving to secure a NodeJS app with Keycloak for the first time. And it was extremely motivating to start coding again. I can really feel all the knowledge I absorbed start to piece together. I am excited to move forward with tutorials to further learn my way around Keycloak. I have been communicating with other groups on how to deploy Keycloak on AWS Kubernetes. I know what I personally need to improve on to further help elevate my teams process during our next Sprint.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Andrew Sychtysz Software Developer by Andrew Sychtysz and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.