Draw your Own Map Pattern

So far, I have looked through all the patterns in the book as learning patterns. This pattern is somehow different it shows not a formula for growth but a remedy against decay. It tells us of things to come in our professional lives. It warns of the possibility of professional demands that can crush one’s soul. It tells stories of individuals bravely breaking through barriers imposed by different situations in life.

This pattern may seem unwarranted to the steps we are about to take, moving in fresh to the work force, but I believe it applies just as well now as it probably will 4 or 8 years from now. With the semester coming to an end many students probably had an internship opportunity, but many more probably didn’t. Finding out what makes someone tick can be hard especially with the lack of reasonable experience in different subfields. There is a lot of opportunity out there but not all of it are the best fit. I refrain from saying good or bad because I believe these are relative qualifiers.

Knowing what you want is important and changing your mind about what you thought you wanted is part of the process too. A lot of us will start on the first opportunity that comes out. Some of us may be luckier and have a short buffer to sort through a little. None will truly know what they are handed until they take the first step. But regardless of when and which, we must know the direction we want to take. Even not so glorious opportunities can serve us well as long as there are steppingstones in the right direction. We must watch for the fool stones, and this happens a lot I can say it from personal experience. You may find yourself in a place filled with opportunities that do not apply to you only because systematically maintaining you where you are is of greater interest to your employer and believe me, they will do the dance to have you stay there as long as possible. The author warns for that specifically. I think we are at a better place than the examples the author mentions. These people where stuck for years and the longer you take to move the greater obsolescence in your skill set. We must not wait long when is time to move. Employers have their own interest, and it is perfectly fine and healthy. But so should you have your own interests at heart and if they don’t align, then perhaps it is better for the employer, as well as yourself, to part ways.

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

Sprint 2 Retrospective

For the second sprint, we tried some of the changes we talked about from the first sprint retrospective and some things turned out better than before, but we still have some things we can work on.

Our main concern from the previous sprint was communication, especially on gitlab, and we believe that we have improved because we have been commenting more on issues and stuck to approving and completing merge requests outside of meetings. Up until the last meeting, we were caught up with merge requests and dealing with them before meetings. We made a rule to have merge requests get approved by at least two people before we make the merge. Only a couple issues had to get unapproved because of some problems that some of us who approved didn’t catch, but most of them went through normally. It is also good that we were able to adapt to new technologies that we started working with when it came to test classes and issues relating to automation. Half of us mainly focused on the backend data and test classes while the other half worked on other issues for the backend and API, along with one of the sets of data and test classes. Despite the gap between meetings from before spring break and after the two cancelled classes when we came back, we were able to finish most of the issues that we had for that sprint before the review and only a couple were moved to the product backlog for the last sprint.

The big thing that was a problem for us was the gap between meetings. We were doing some communicating online to stay caught up with issues, but we can improve on that. While we were able to finish most of the issues and got credit for the weight of work, we were rushing near the end to get everything done and had those couple issues we had to push back to the backlog, and there was some disorganization because some of the issues were not being assigned to epics. We have cleaned up the boards and they are all organized now. We wanted to work more on giving better names and descriptions to some of the issues, not just for consistency, but also because some of them were vague or unclear. Lastly, we want to continue our plan with approving merge requests and then merging them outside of class, but want to stay caught up with them because the merge requests filled up for the last meeting of the second sprint and we had to go through each one like how we did before, which was using up time that could be used for other things. We want to improve upon this sprint and have the last sprint be the best one.

As for me and how I did with the sprint and team, I would say I improved from before because I was communicating more online than the first sprint, which was my main focus of improvement. I was more involved in discussions on discord about planning and issues, and I stayed the same for in person discussions because I already getting involved in person. Going forward, I want to try and comment more on gitlab issues if I have any questions.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/foodkeeper/foodkeeper-newbackend/-/merge_requests/13?

Making the data file for the category object that has the methods used in the category endpoints.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/foodkeeper/foodkeeper-newbackend/-/merge_requests/15

Making the test file for category to test the methods I made in the data file.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/foodkeeper/foodkeeper-newbackend/-/merge_requests/16

The endpoint name changes for the backend to maintain consistency.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/common-services/foodkeeper/foodkeeperapi/-/merge_requests/46

The changes for the endpoint names where they appear in the API to match the changes in the backend.

From the blog Jeffery Neal's Blog by jneal44 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 2 Retrospective:

This sprint ran more smoothly than Sprint 1 did. As a result of having obtained a more detailed specification by coordinating with the goals laid out by Dr. Burge from Nassau Community College and having obtained a better understanding of the individual skill-sets of our team members, we were able to produce an OpenAPI specification that defined 8 of the 9 requested endpoint definitions. The yaml file containing these definitions was then used to write, build, and test these endpoints in our back-end container. These methods were then tested internally within the container by using the Visual Studio Code environment to launch HTTP requests from 2 files (guest.http and qs.http). “Swagger UI” was used as a VSCode extension to facilitate this process.

It was easier this sprint to distribute work among the team, because the Open-API spec was available shortly after the start of the sprint, enabling back-end code to be written and unit tested. As testing progressed, we would modify the spec as we made changes to the back-end code to fix bugs.

Although we did a better job at keeping the Git-lab Epics and Issues boards properly in place than in the prior sprint, this may have been the weakest area of our efforts. Our intention is to improve the ongoing modification of this Scrum material as we progress to sprint 3.

We improved our use and efficiency of GIT to Git-Lab coordination, were able to build semantic versioning, checked the structure of the Open-API definition with Swagger Preview, and started looking into using a secure key. This key will be coordinated as a priority in the sprint 3 effort through communication with the IAM team.

I was able to set up a fork of the NEST Android application with the intention of doing system testing of the REST API. By using Android Studio, my prior knowledge of Android development with Java, and the help of a guiding YouTube video, along with general help from stackoverflow.com community, I was able to write 6 classes in an isolated namespace to the project. This code uses an android library call Volley to facilitate REST API development. This code launches an activity from the main NEST activity which allows the user to make requests to the remote back-end MongoDB database, and returns responses, which are then displayed in a scroll-able text view component.

The layout used by this activity used a relatively new UI component called a Constraint Layout, which improves the efficiency and maintainability of its XML code with the support of a sophisticated design tool allowing “drag and drop” of components, allowing them to effectively present a user interface which will scale properly over the hundreds of different android devices, all with different screen resolutions, aspect ratios, and device sizes.

The system testing was burdened by the fact that calls from Android were producing a Timeout Error on every attempt. With the help of Dr. Wurst, I am in a better position to get these calls working by the first week of the upcoming sprint.

I was impressed with this sprint, because our team accomplished the 2 main goals of this classroom effort, the first being to improve the skill-set of the team members in a “real world” development effort, and secondly, to help with the general progress of the LibreFoodPantry work to produce a product to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

From the blog cs@worcester – (Twinstar Blogland) by Joe Barry and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Retrospective 2

The second sprint for my software development capstone class was on an honest note a bumpy road. The purpose of the sprint was to start the next level implementation of creating test files using mocha and chai also making sure the API is validated and can be bundled properly. Through the first part of the sprint the team has been very productive on keeping up with the issues we made for ourselves. After Spring break, our productivity started to plummet since we did not accomplish issues the following, we did not have our class meetings. 

As for my team members and I, we have faced greats issues that we started to come across that stumbled all of us. Due to facts of, lack of knowledge, merge requests, and was not able to accomplish all our issues for the sprint. First, when it came to merge request, I admit we have gotten better on how Git operates. But when it came to approving the request assigned to us. We had a pile of request that was not merged and had to spend our class meetings to squash all of time to keep the main repository up to date as soon as possible. Secondly, our productivity has plummeted since our spring break, we did not have to work on anything which was completely optional. But the following week we did not have any class meetings, we did not put in any effort at all and treated it as another extension of spring break. Third, as we gotten more depth of the issues, we did not have any knowledge on how to tackle certain issues. Because the remaining issues were dependent on each other to complete thus since we could not complete them, we had to tackle them towards our next and final sprint. 

Our team has reached a verdict to not stagger on our productivity. Especially when the third sprint is going to be our final one for the capstone class. We decided and wanted to be more proactive and aiding each other’s workspaces when there is possibly something we don’t know or don’t understand. Talked about gathering information from our professor on any recommendations he may give to us to set us on the same page. 

In regards towards myself, I had made good achievements but of course I as could’ve made better improvements that could’ve better contributed to our team. I wanted to learn more about how to implement Mocha and Chai testing. But I chose to do more of the basic parts of the issues to get them out of the way. But for the next I will be taking at least one or two issues that we made to create a more solid test file for all the tests to pass. I will be speaking to my team member that did extensive research to see if he can aid me in how to go about fixing and implement our test files already made gave at least the experience. 

Sprint 2 Issues

From the blog cs@worcester – Dahwal Dev by Dahwal Charles and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 2 Retrospective

Our sprint went well we wanted to finalize major features on the front end and the back end in order to have the necessary fully functioning for its operation. Our group collaborated on creating sprint objectives that we all agreed were important to focus on in the sprint. We ordered our work items in order from most to least important, which was helpful in focusing on getting the most relevant work done first. This helped later tasks because the issues below were dependent upon other issues being finished first.

Learning lessons from the last sprint, we managed our code much more efficiently this time around. We created a small branch for each time we were going to make a change to the CodeBase. Each one of these branches only changed a small portion of the code or added a small feature. Once we finish this change, we will immediately submit a merge request and have it incorporated into the code as soon as possible. This minimized the amount of divergence from other branches while people were working on their code. We had large stagnant branches that diverged from the other ones in the last sprint, and merging them became incredibly difficult. This time, we did small branches in merge consistently, which kept everyone’s codebase on track. We also set up testing, which still needs further tests, but this allows us to ensure that our changes are not going to break essential features when merged into the main branch.

We had one issue that some issues were dependent on other issues to be completed first. When one individual took longer than expected on an issue that required to be finished first before others could work on theirs, it left some students unable to work on essential features. In the future, it would make sense to re-distribute those tasks to individuals who were not being challenged or add another person to the issue to get it completed more quickly.

As a team, we did a good job at roughly keeping each other member aware of the current task we were working on. In the future, I think we could improve the detail of exactly what we are working on, which would help other team members adjust the priority of which issues they should be tackling. Overall, we did have a good improvement from the first sprint in communication. In this sprint, we also worked well at updating the sprint board and tasks as we finished and moved them onto the next stage.

For the final sprint, our team should work on creating broad goals that we want to achieve and turning those into smaller tasks that individuals can work on. At the end of the next sprint, our goal is to have a working front end and backend that can be deployed within a single docker container, and this will be broken down into smaller sub-tasks that each person can focus on achieving.

As I said for the teams’ comments, I should precisely make it what I am working on more well-known. This will improve the team’s performance because students will be able to choose their tasks better accordingly. I will enhance this during our standup meetings by going into more detail about my current tasks. I did improve over the last sprint and made sure to update the issues board so that two people do not work on the same issue simultaneously.

Issues Completed During Sprint 2

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 Retrospecitve Blog 2

We have made good progress in the second sprint, which was our objective to build on top of what we already did in the previous sprint. We have seen some results, but it could have been a lot better if we had changed some of the methods. 

  1. Plan in advance what to discuss for the future sprint discuss
  2. The detailed plans for every issue,
  3. Better communication in general 
  4. Think about the big picture 
  5. Break issues into small pieces
  6. Daily stand up to need to be more prepare
  7. Documentation needs to be clear and sample.
  8. How do we use time in class more efficiently 
  9. Go to detail and ask questions related to the issues and find the solutions. 

Since we’ve agreed that we need to improve what we do and how we do it, I’ve decided to narrow it down and be more specific about what we need to do to achieve the results we want. 

This sprint focused on the effectiveness of our abilities to work as a team. Since we already had a good idea about how we wanted our platform, we wanted to focus on the mechanisms of the way to work as a team. We had so much overlapped work between one another. For example, duplicates, comments, and misdirections to interpret others’ ideas caused a massive delay, which impacted us from making meaningful progress. Identifying the cause of the problem will help us prepare for the future. There is a list of the things that we think should be implemented to make the team more efficient. 

First, clarify the vision: You must first understand what you are trying to achieve before deciding how to solve a problem. Clarification is essential for teamwork to be successful. For this reason, we should write down our vision for each sprint. Detailing the issues will help us weigh the issues properly and break them down if necessary. We will be able to tell if the steps you’re taking will help us achieve our vision and if our problem-solving efforts were successful if we write down our vision. This step will be a great advantage in resolving the issues.

Second, Define the issue. Writing a vision statement gives everyone a basic understanding of what needs to be done. but it’s more concerned with what happens after the problem is solved than with the problem itself. That’s why it’s critical to write an issue statement that clearly defines the problem. We have seen issues that had nested issues, this should be a brief statement that describes the problem and explains why it is important to solve the problem. After all, how can we solve a problem if you don’t know what it is? 

Third, defying the context of the issues. Consider whether a business problem affects multiple individuals or functions within our project as a team, or if it only affects specific issue lines that we are working on. To be able to identify how to increase the performance of our work will help us to determine the best course of action. We felt that we need to better in this type of context. Learn how to write proper issues and better execution as a team.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by proctech21 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Apprenticeship Pattern: Record What You Learn

The pattern I decided to read is titled “Record What You Learn” from chapter 5 of Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. This pattern starts out by giving context of a situation I know I have found myself in multiple times. This situation is one where I am relearning the same technical lessons over and over again. The proposed solution to this problem is to keep a chronological record of the lessons I’ve learned. This record can be made in the format of a blog or wiki, to name a few options. Additionally, these kinds of records can be made public or private. Public records are good for building connections since others can read them and private records are good for being painfully honest with yourself about your progress. The last section of the solution ends on discussing how your record keeping tool can be an example of a Breakable Toy and how this Breakable Toy can help you extract lessons from it as one grows from a novice to a more experienced developer. The actionable item this excerpt ends with is encouraging its readers to start immediately because these entries can become the basis for books, magazines, and blog posts in the future.

In response to the question, “Will this pattern cause you to change the way you will work?”, my answer is a resounding yes. I’ve read this pattern multiple times before writing this blog post and have slowly been successfully developing my own personal journal/“Breakable toy”. I think one of the reasons why this has been so effective for me has to do with the following line I found interesting while reading this pattern, “The private record allows you to be painfully honest with yourself about the progress you are making”. In my journal, I get to reflect on how well I truly know certain technologies and what I still want to learn. And whenever I learn something new, I write about it in a way that is meaningful to me (as opposed to doing work for a class deadline). Therefore, I completely agree with the information in this pattern. It has been a super beneficial process for me so far and it is rewarding to physically see the evidence of what I’ve been learning in one localized place. I’m happy that if I have taken anything from this book, it is a journal/“Breakable Toy” I can continue using in my career and life.

From the blog Sensinci's Blog by Sensinci's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint #2 Retrospective

Issues Evidence

Issue:: backend: look at all lose files in backend/ and determine what is needed and keep them if so.

This issue was worked out in different layers. I wanted to be careful to maintain integrity while modifying the code.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/nest/guest-information-system/backend/-/issues/11

Issue:: backend: in source/data create .js files for methods to be used.

In this issue we have decided after reviewing the code from last semester’s software architecture class that we would reuse it because it served the purpose of the project. Much of the code had to be changed and reformatted to meet our needs.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/nest/guest-information-system/backend/-/issues/5

Issue:: backend: source/ figure out index.js

This file initialized the objects that are important for the operations across the various actions the backend is responsible for. My idea was to explore and find out more about the JavaScript syntax and methods and modules handling as well as behaviors.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/nest/guest-information-system/backend/-/issues/7

Issue:: all: setup semantic release.

This was commission by Dr. Wurst, my colleague Robin and I had already worked through the process of factoring the steps needed to set up the continuous integration GitLab environment. Even though the steps were clear, I took longer than expected some failures along the way actually helped me look deeper into the settings of the continuous integration environment and experiment on them to find out the innerworkings of GitLab’s continuous integration tool and its security.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/nest/guest-information-system/general-repository/-/issues/10

  •   Reflection on what worked well

In this sprint we tried to work out the issues we had on the first. The idea was to not repeat the mistakes already made and if mistakes were made, we would want them to at least be new ones. In that sense our sprint was successful we were able to identify and adjust expectations. One of the important things that we worked on was to be more specific on the issues and to delineate a better definition of done. In this sprint we were able to connect our different projects and also able to identify points where modifications need to be made in order to work properly.

  •   Reflection on what didn’t work well

Our team suffered from the short absence of some members due to personal unforeseen reasons. The team adapted and the absentee members put back in their missing share and we were able to still have our goals completed. We communicated well as a team but sometimes we would put in too much work leaving little to share. Thankfully the work done individually was hardly final and the trouble shooting, and integration made sure everyone had a part to play. We also had trouble with issue artifacts from the last spring. The names didn’t help us make much sense of what we needed then and moving them around got us a bit lost on planning for the last sprint.

  • Reflection on what changes could be made to improve as a team

To improve as a team, I think communication is definitely key. We should have more meetings outside class and maybe work on issues within these meetings. I see that sometimes we do work during class, but I think these one-on-one meetings would be better utilized for higher level organization, like adjusting tasks, trouble shooting, cleaning up the repo and other tasks. Reaching out is also a good idea if anyone is stuck. It not only helps the person trying to solve the problem but also whoever is there to help. It reinforces what they know and build confidence at the team level.

  •   Reflection on what changes could be made to improve as an individual

I personally think that I could have done more if I have not obsessed over an issue or another. I actually have found myself paralyzed by over planning. I have so many things to get done that organizing how to do them take longer than it is worth. I increasingly found that a generic schedule with cut off set times to switch from one activity to the next can help but a lot of times I freeze when stuck and enter a brute force infinite loop. This account for most of my wasted time that is when I believe that productivity not only flattens but drops so sharply that even if I moved forward, I still feel like I am stepping backwards. Shuffling tasks is truly the best way to succeed in not all but most so ill try to be better at that.  

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

Sprint 2 Retrospective

My team is about to move on to our third sprint, so I want to spend some time reflecting on how our second sprint went. Our plan for this sprint was to build a working demo of a Kubernetes cluster that we could deploy to AWS EKS. While we did not get everything done that we wanted, I am happy with the progress we made during this sprint. We got very close to deploying our cluster; the cluster is nearly set up, and AWS EKS has been configured for it. We are prepared to finish our demo at the beginning of our third sprint.

I think for this sprint, we had a much stronger idea about what we actually wanted to accomplish. Compared to our first sprint, this second sprint was much focused more on creating something than on research. It was easier to divide tasks into manageable issues, and it was clear what had to be completed with each issue. Not that the research we focused on wasn’t important, but it was satisfying to be able to apply that research to an actual demo.

In the same vein as the above discussion, having a more streamlined idea of what needed to get done did make it a little more difficult to work. A lot of the issues we decided on depended on the completion of others. It was difficult deciding which issues to take on individually; I felt bad doing nothing while waiting for whatever issues needed to be completed first got done, but in some cases it was necessary. As we complete our demo and move on to focus on communicating with other teams about our project, however, I think this will be less of an issue.

As a team, I think we could still improve our use of Gitlab for communication. I think we were definitely better about it during our second sprint, but our communication was largely remained on Discord, Zoom, or in person. It would be nice to have a more permanent record of our discussions, especially when those discussions are about the work we’re doing and the direction that work should be leading us.

As an individual, I want to take on more challenging work. The issues I worked on during this sprint were pretty simple, and two of the three of them were very easy to complete. I think it would be a better learning experience for myself if I tried to focus on more complicated issues. I also want to get better at communicating with my team. I think I should be talking more to my team members about my progress on whatever I am working on.

Contributions:

Add commitlint to gitlab-ci.yml to demo repository – I added a gitlab-ci.yml file to the repository that will host our demo.

Look into IAM Roles for EKS – In order to deploy a Kubernetes cluster to EKS, it (along with its nodes) must be assigned an IAM role. This post details the roles Amazon recommends using, and it has links to instructions on setting them up properly.

Determine what projects we are using for the demo – We decided to use a simplified version of a frontend/backend/API project for our demo.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ciampa's Computer Science Blog by robiciampa and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 2 Retrospective

Now for sprint 2, much has changed in which the direction, work, communication and more has changed from the previous sprint. There seems to be more communication and a better direction of where we are going and a more complete vision based on the project. There are still questions on what to do and where exactly we are going to end up by the end of the project but hopefully that can be figured out in to coming days. There is also the collaboration between other groups that need to be sorted out.

On what has worked well, we have made good progress on building the API and backend in that there are functioning pieces of code we can work with. The NestAPIMap Joe had obtained from the previous sprint had provided a good starting point for the sprint. The http calls are functioning as they should be and the overall structure of the project seems sound. There was a lot of functionality added to which the API and the backend actually works when previously we didn’t quite have much working at all which is nice. The changes made to the project are numerous and a good sign of work getting done.

On what has not worked well, there is still a feeling of misdirection as we are still new to this kind of work so it shouldn’t be surprising that this is happening. There are parts where people work on different parts on their own and later on do different things than intended in which other people who are working on the same issue don’t know that it has already been finished. The flow of issues from being worked on to done wasn’t quite as fluid as the last sprint as most of them just stayed in process section till the last day in which we sorted them out there.

We could improve as a team by communicating better on the work being done and what is free to do so that way the work could have been more evenly distributed. It felt like some people did more work than what was originally intended/different from what was thought of. There was a lack of usage of the issue board on GitLab which contributed to this problem and that it would be beneficial to have a better flow of finishing issues so that way we know better on what to do or not to do and that there isn’t a backlog of issues all waiting to be sorted until the last day.

I could improve as personally I was also part of the problem of communicating between others on what issues were being done and didn’t quite contribute as much as I could’ve to the project. I feel like I could’ve done quite a bit more contribution work to the backend with the calls and hopefully in the next sprint I dive into some issues and get more meaningful work done. There is the issue of all the other classes I am taking starting to reach their end so I will have to watch for that.

From the blog CS@Worcester – kbcoding by kennybui986 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.