Sprint 3 Retrospective

The course of our sprint was good, we completed large sections on the frontend and backend from the last sprint to get the necessary functionality to integrate the front end and backend together. We achieved our sprint goals by all agreeing on what was most important to focus on in the sprint, which helped us on completing our ultimate sprint objective. We structured our issues in such a way that they were less dependent on each other for completion. This strategy maximized the number of issues that could be completed without having to wait for someone to submit their issue first.

Keeping in mind the lessons from our previous sprints, we continued to work in small branches dedicated to one issue at a time. There was minimal code divergence because of our fast branch, merge, branch strategy. It was tempting to keep developing in the same branch, but with the small size of our project, the structure of our project changed very quickly. Merging large branches together often resulted in breaking code in the past. By our third sprint, we had developed a great workflow and collaborated seamlessly. Two large braking changes we made this sprint were updating the port numbers for the backend and frontend as well as updating the fields within the guest info record.

With our workflow and communication, our team updated internal ports, mapped them to docker images, and reflected the changes in docker-compose files for code in multiple repositions. All while maintaining integration of the frontend and backend code. We also had to remove and add new fields for the guest record. This required modifying the OpenAPI Schema, handling the changes in the backend, and modifying the form on the frontend. By doing small branches in coordination with our team members, these major changes were made without issue. If this was our first sprint, things would have been more difficult. I see the ease at which we made these major updates as evidence of how much we have developed over the semester.

Overall, there were no significant indefinable changes we should make as a team. As always, we should aim to communicate with each other to the best of our ability. In my opinion, we did this well and left little room for a need to improve. Although our in-team communication was excellent, one area that still needs improvement is our communication between teams. We improved on this compared to the last sprint by working with other teams using the credit card scanner, sharing CSS styling, and meeting with the Kubernetes team to discuss integration. However, we wanted to implement keycloak this sprint, but we did not accomplish that task. The reason for this was both due to running out of time and failing to have enough dialogue with the IAM team to learn how their system would integrate with our system. If we had the fourth sprint, I am sure we would be able to learn from our experience and succeed at implementing these features in the future.

Overall, I improved significantly between sprint one and sprint three. I could still improve the amount of communication I have from team to team and take it upon myself to reach out more. I did do this during sprint three more than I had in the previous sprints, but improvement could be made in the number of times I reached out.

Issues Completed During Sprint 3

∙ Create a second connector class for sending data to RabbitMQ to make changing RabbitMQ for another message broker-client simple without updating its use through the code. [https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/issues/35]

∙ Fix the issue where adding a new guest via API request on the backend throws server error and does not add new gues to the database or RabbitMQ [https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/issues/38]

∙ Create an environmental variable for delaying the start of the NodeJS server to wait for the RabbitMQ instance to be ready for connection [https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/issues/40]

∙ Remove and add new fields for the guest record within the OpenAPI for the GuestInfoSystem as well as modify the backend to handle these changes [https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/api/-/issues/12]

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

Sprint 3 Retrospective

To start with, our communication got a lot better about when we were done working on things, and about what needed to be done before the rest of us could work on new issues. Our prioritization also improved greatly, with us figuring out what was most vital in order to get our project as far along as we could in the last sprint. Our issues were also a lot clear in terms of what needed to be done, and we were relatively efficient in assigning and working on them as needed. I also felt that personally, I was extremely productive during this sprint, more so than I had been in the others, and this was the first sprint I felt that I had an extremely clear goal and something that was important and useful that I was working on.

That being said, I felt like other parts of team communication were lacking somewhat. We still struggled with knowing what everyone else was working on, and there were a lot of cases where it seemed like some people were finished and waiting on others, or were just unsure of what to do next. I felt like the backend not being fully functional still was a huge holdup to the rest of our work, but there were still some small things that could’ve been done without it. I think that having a clear end date on when we would be able to work on the project left us with less motivation to get some things done, as they would likely have to be redone by future teams, so I just think that our overall planning was a little bit lacking for the amount of work we had to do in some places, as evidenced by our remaining issues in the sprint backlog.

As a team, I think that we should have improved our communication a bit more, and more time spent looking at what actually needed to be done in the code could’ve helped us break up the work a little bit more. But I also think that this largely comes from our lack of clear direction and prioritization in the prior sprints. I think that greater clarity and communication about what we did, what we were working on, and what we needed done could’ve helped avoid a lot of the issues we ran into this sprint, and I think that overall having a clearer picture of the overarching architecture required for all of this could’ve helped us a lot. If we had spent more time getting to know exactly what we had done and what we needed to do could’ve helped us significantly improve our performance in this case.

As an individual, I think that I should’ve been more open about what I was doing with my team, and this sprint has given me an example of how I need to, in the future, pay more attention to the vital parts of the project, so we can get those working before we start working on the meat of it all. I should have been more meticulous previously, and less short-sighted when creating issues. Spending more time looking through the code and what we needed could’ve helped greatly here, I feel.

Issue #36: This started off as just adding bin files to start and build the backend server, but became reconfiguring and rewriting all the server files to get the backend server and API functioning.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kurt Maiser's Coding Blog by kmaiser and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Breakable Toys

This week’s Craftsmanship Pattern is another important one, breakable toys. This stands for the idea that experience is built upon failure just as much, if not more, than success. This idea is very good, as no one wants to fail, but failing is one of the best ways to learn, as if you are always successful, it is much more difficult to learn what does not work and what to avoid. The idea of never failing means you will never take any risks. To quote one of my favorite memes, “You didn’t grow. You didn’t improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.” While the above is pointed at cheating in a very difficult video game instead of “Gitting Gud” (intentional spelling) to pass a difficult task, I feel like the same idea applies here as well. It is important to learn what to do to succeed from what does not work, and what does work to continue using it.

To help with this growing, and similar to last weeks, it can be good to set up a private space where you can seek out this failure to learn from the experiences. For projects that you can fail on, try to build you own minor application, maybe a calendar or address book, for example. Things that are not too big, but still good enough to allow for failure without negatively impacting you. One highly recommended thing to do in the book is to create your own personal wiki, as you can use it to record what you learn. They are also nice since they can be simple, but still allows you to learn about things like HTTPS, REST, parsing, web design, etc. Sticking with this long enough will teach you about many things you many not have been exposed to otherwise, again creating an overall positive experience, because you will have some failure along the way, but how you overcame the failure is important. The book shows an email that Linus Torvalds saying that he is making a free OS based loosely off of minix, and those who know know where he went with this, and that is where we got Linux.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Erockwood Blog by erockwood and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Apprenticeship Pattern: Expand Your Bandwidth

Christian Shadis

In the apprenticeship pattern Expand Your Bandwidth, Hoover and Oshineye explore the importance of learning as much new information as possible as a new developer. They talk about how many developers have relatively low understanding of programming concepts when they enter the workforce, and how these new programmers can take advantage of the wealth of knowledge available for consumption. They make the analogy of drinking out of a straw versus out of a firehose – increase the volume of information you consume as much as possible.

This pattern particularly resonated with me. I feel as though I have a very solid low-level understanding of several different concepts in the world of software development and data analytics. I lack that high-level expertise in all the subjects I have studied in the past three years. I have attempted to emulate this pattern before learning about it: I have a shelf stuffed with books about everything from CS basics to networking to Machine Learning, and I do my best to read as much as possible about the subject.

As mentioned in my previous post, I entered the Computer Science world far later than I would have preferred and faced the difficulty of entering a vast industry filled with passionate, lifelong learners as a programmer with absolutely no knowledge of anything related to computer science. I believe I have spent my time wisely, learning lots of information about several different subjects, and managed to build up a solid toolkit before graduating.

I hope to use this pattern throughout my career, but especially so over this coming summer. I will be seeking employment as a software developer or engineer, and I feel as though some gaps in my knowledge should be plugged up as soon as possible. I plan to do a deep dive on full-stack development and connecting the frontend and backend of a system and use my newfound knowledge to do a complete rebuild of my website (ctshadis.github.io) with a proper full stack and domain name. I believe this will require learning lots of new information and applying it immediately in a way that will make me more qualified for any full-stack development jobs I apply for.

Reference: Hoover, D. H., & Oshineye, A. (2010). Perpetual Learning. In Apprenticeship patterns: Guidance for the aspiring software craftsman. O’Reilly.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Christian Shadis' Blog by ctshadis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Share What You Learn

To avoid frustration, I try to keep myself motivated by thinking about the feeling when I complete my task. Along with the feeling of completion, sharing information among people is some sort of motivation that I want to show off every time I learn something useful.

In my view, I am not a beginner applying this method introduced in Dave Hoover’s book since I am not feeling strange when I explain to my mates what I have learnt, instead, I actually like doing it because it is not only a way to help my mates understand the part that I have been working on but also a great opportunity to test my understanding over subject and enhance my memorization onto it.

I started feeling the benefits of sharing information with other people since high school. Back then, I mostly helped my friends when they didn’t understand some math problems in class, and every time I do it, I remember that issue much longer, and I feel more comfortable with the technique used to solve that problem. The more I “teach” them, the better my “teaching” skill and my sense of learning improves as well. As they started counting on me in these difficult tasks, I would perceive the sense of motivation to push my learning into the higher level.

We are afraid of having a conversation about a topic that we do not really comprehend. In both math and code, exchanging information, in my opinion, is an infamous problem since I have encountered lots of people who suffer from it. Coding and mathematics have a similar concept (it is like a feeling, but I cannot think of a more specific word to describe it) that once you understand the flow, solving their problems is utterly attractive. Therefore, besides the benefit of improving my apprehension, I also want to help my friends be able to comfortably debate when it comes to specialized topics.

As we grow, we have less confidence to ask other people, searching for problems online is therefore becoming a more popular approach. Hence, publishing blog posts to share my learning will be my next path to maintain my motivation and improve my understanding. Stay tuned!!

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

Find Mentors

Many apprentices in this craft are inexperienced and have little knowledge of what’s next in store for them or how to prepare for what’s to come. Luckily, most apprentices, are not the first person to walk down the same path, and there are many people who are experienced and knowledgeable who could provide help and guidance when needed. This apprenticeship pattern is about finding these people and having them mentor you in your journey to becoming a master craftsman.

Mentors can be quite hard to find. It may be easy to locate authors of books on the craft, accomplished conference speakers, committers on popular open-source projects, and developers of successful websites. However, it is difficult to convince them to mentor you. They may not be interested, or they feel intimidated by the request. One should expect rejection as a risk. However, the risk of being rejected by a mentor is fairly low, while the payoff is massive. The key when searching for mentors is to be tenacious and appreciative.

One thing to keep in mind when searching for mentors is that it’s important to understand that mentors are also going through their own journeys towards becoming master craftsmen and that no one person knows everything. It’s tempting to want your mentor to be a master because of their vast and deep knowledge of the craft. However, such temptations should always be resisted. You shouldn’t dismiss mentors by over-focusing on their inevitable weaknesses or blind spots, these mentors still have a lot to offer.

Although this apprenticeship pattern discusses a simple concept, it is extremely important. Finding people to guide you in your journey is invaluable. Mentors can help you make the right decisions for you, they can teach you new techniques, they can give you tips about the craft, and they can give insight into what you can expect. Every apprentice should actively look for mentors and learn as much as they can from them. By the same token, it’s important to realize that just as you are looking for mentorship from people ahead of you, there are also people who are behind you who seek mentorship from you. Being able to pass on your knowledge and experience is one of the ways where an apprentice can begin to transition into a journeyman.

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

Sprint 3 – Retrospective

I thought that the team functioned well this sprint, despite not being able to complete our ultimate goal, which is to have the backend be fully functional. I think the team communicated much better during this sprint than in the past two sprints. I also think every team member tried to put in the effort to do their part and accomplish our tasks despite coming up short. I think we underestimated the sheer amount of time that it would take to finish the backend. We all thought that we were very close to getting to work and that we would have plenty of time to work on testing the endpoints and other files. However, that turned out not to be the case and we spent most of the sprint trying to get the backend to work.

Individually, I think that I performed well during this sprint. I tried to take an active role in the sprint planning portion of this sprint, and I tried to communicate with teammates more often than in previous sprints. I managed to this sprint to upload the RabbitMQ demonstration that I created and researched during the last sprint in the general repository. I spent time working with Julion to merge the updatedFunctionality branch to the Main branch in the CheckoutGuestFrontend repository. The updatedFunctionality branch had all the necessary src files, and by merging this branch to Main, the CheckoutGuestFrontend finally has functionality like the other two frontends in this project. I also spent some time looking at the backend near the end of the sprint trying to find solutions to the errors that we were facing.

I think that the team could have done some things better in this sprint. I think when we figured out that the backend was going to take a much longer time than expected to get it working, we should have redirected our focus for the sprint and had the entire teamwork on getting it to work. I think the team should have done an overhaul of our issues. Many of our issues were either too ambitious or required the backend to work in order to proceed (testing the endpoints for example). I think many of the tasks in our sprint backlog and product backlog could have been broken down into smaller, but simpler and more realistic tasks.

Personally, I think I have a lot of room for improvement after this sprint. I should have definitely spent more time looking at the backend and researching ways to solve the different errors that we kept getting. I also should have paid closer attention to the issues that we created during the sprint planning period and really evaluated how much time they would take. Over the course of this sprint as well as the past two sprints, I have learned that taking an active role in communicating and helping my teammates, being more involved in the planning process, and being realistic about what I can do during a sprint are all things that I will need to succeed in my professional career as a software developer.

Issues that I worked on:

Issue Community#69: Upload RabbitMQ demonstration to General

Issue CheckOutGuestFrontend#11: Merge the updatedFunctionality branch to the Main branch

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

Find Mentors

Programming alone can be difficult with unclear paths to take with lots of uncertainty about which approach will be the best. Without someone who can give you guidance, it makes it difficult to move forward alone. It is necessary to find a mentor who will be there to guide you in times of uncertainty. The mentor you find does not need to be someone who knows all, but someone who has more knowledge and experience than you in a particular programming area. Finding a mentor requires a lot of searching because they may be hard to find, especially finding someone who is willing to spend the time to help. However, when you find one, they will provide a world of experience.

I found it interesting the author himself found a mentor after a few years of already being a programmer. It shows that it is never too late to find someone who knows more than you and to ask for help. This practice relates back to a previous pattern about exposing your ignorance. You must be willing to do this in order to get the proper guidance.

This pattern focuses on the theme of approaching programming as a craft where you must start as an apprentice. This reminds me of my grandfather who was a carpenter. When he was young, he started small jobs without much knowledge. He learned from the other men on the job who were eager to teach him what they knew. Eventually, he learned as much as they did and in his later years went on to share his knowledge with those who were younger just learning their craft.

After reading this far into the book, I have reshaped the way I view the development landscape. I feel that it requires the perspective of apprenticeship and the need for finding others to help you develop your craft. I think it is possible that at the same time you are being mentored, you can also be mentoring someone else. There are no areas in this pattern where I disagree with the author. I find that his recommendations and personal experience are well thought out and are great advice.

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

Retreat into Competence Pattern

For this week’s apprenticeship pattern, I did a reading on “Retreat into Competence”. Retreat into Competence pattern about feeling overwhelmed, realizing how little you know about or taking on a big project and things may not be working so well for you. In this pattern it talks about how you should “pull back and then launch forward like a stone from a catapult”. What this means it to retreat to a zone where you’re comfortable with and once you feel ready, you’ll be able to launch yourself even further than before you might have felt ‘stuck’. An example I found from this pattern is pick something that can be self-contained that you know really well and stick with it, by doing this, opportunities will emerge, and it will allow you to capitalize on those opportunities and you will end with great gains.

Unlike my other blog posts, my initial reaction is not quite the same since I have yet to experience this. The closest time I ever felt overwhelmed is just the pressure of trying to find a job by graduation. Its not exactly related to what this pattern talks about but the same concept. For me, it was a matter of constantly getting rejection emails from companies, so I took a step back to look at what I may be missing. Once I was able to go over my resume and qualifications, I started to reapply and now I am starting to receive multiple invitations to take coding assessments and scheduling interview dates. This pattern goes hand to hand with ‘Expose Your Ignorance’ and ‘Confront Your Ignorance’.

The pattern has changed the way I view my profession because I never thought about needing to take a step back in programming. Maybe because I never ran into a situation where I needed to? However, after reading about this pattern I started to reflect on the things I’ve done so far and what else could I do to improve my programming skills and knowledge. I am also trying to figure out what I am really good at so I can focus a little bit more on that skill and work around it so when the time comes and an opportunity presents itself, I will be able to capitalize on it.

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

The Long Road

This week I have decided to write about the long road. As we reach the end of the semester, it seems like a good time to acess the road ahead of me as a software craftsmen. Thus far, I have seen my road as just getting a software job. And everything else was secondary to that. That road included going to school, creating a resume, appying for jobs, studying for interviews, and interviewing. Many of these tasks included programming, but most of this time was not actually spent programming. Now I will be starting my first software job after graduation, and it is the perfect time to consider the road ahead.

Dave mentions that a craftsmen can achieve almost anything if he stays with his craft for 20 years. And that learning is a lifetime skill. He also mentions that the craftsmen should value long term growth over all else, including salary. I have seen online that senior engineers can make comparable salaries to technical managers. So I don’t think that craftsmen need to choose between salary and growing their craft. There seems to be plenty of roles that provide learning oppurtunities, and high salaries. But Dave argues that money should not be the main motivator of the craftsmen.

The action is to imagine my career 20, 30, and 40 years from now. It is difficult for me to say what my career will look like this far out. But I know that I want to work in tech for my entire career. I do know for the next five years I want to work as a Software Engineer. With the hopes of moving from Junior level, to a mid level engineer. From there, I may decide to take on a leadership role, while still focusing on the codebase most of the time. This could be a tech lead, or Senior Engineer role. Twenty years from now, I could either be in leadership, or a may be a very accomplished engineer. It would be very rewarding to be the guy that everyone goes to with questions, and I do like helping other people succeed. So this could be a good path. Thirty years from now I could see myself being a leader of a tech focused small business, or maybe freelancing. Going out on my own is something I have always been interested in. Forty years from now I will be sixty eight. So I will likely be getting ready to retire. But who knows, maybe I will still be coding at that time.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Jim Spisto by jspisto and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.