Week 6 - First Hackathon Experience
Week 6 concludes with finishing our first group hackathon in becoming a Software Developer - My first one ever.
Nominated team leader by the course tutor, what can go wrong?
Actually surprisingly little, inspired by wheel of fortune, we settled on doing a phraseology guessing game (Ok so doing the actual wheel was a bit ambitious in a ~3 day timeframe whilst still learning JavaScript and implementing it into code, with another day however I think I would be quite confident that could actually be implemented.
As a group of 3 it was surprisingly easy to avoid merge conflicts, the main problem I would say was to be learning how to use branches - now almost second nature. Basically we never worked on the same file at the same time, rotating responsibilities (very) occasionally and also taking advantage of pair programming frequently to bounce ideas around and keep everything from coming too monotone just working on the same things!
On Friday the logic in the JavaScript was (pretty much) done, with just a few bugs (it's working as intended, honest) left to work on. There was a slight worry on the progress from my side - completely disappearing once the CSS updates were pushed completely tying everything in and making the project come to life.
Overall keeping the scope smaller, whilst still massively exceeding the required learning objectives worked out quite well, even a basic website proving to be quite complex behind the scene (more-so than expected at least!). Fostering an environment which prevented us from being too stressed on over-stretching ourselves and being able to enjoy the experience, rather than creating a crunch-time style environment with little time to deal with any issues as they arose, allowing for a surprising 100 merges and 266 total commits! - A project that I would call a success!
