Week 8 of the SoC Bootcamp was Project Week and this was the first time we had worked in teams of four and on a project that lasted more than a couple of days. The brief we were given was to build something which enhances the SoC mentoring experience. We did some user research and found that the main areas to improve were better matching of bootcampers to mentors based on areas of interest, and trying to make the process easier for the SoC coaching team by having a central source of information. In response to the we chose to build a platform in which:
- bootcampers could sign up for a mentor
- prospective mentors could find out what mentoring involves and sign up
- bootcampers could view the SoC mentors and see their areas of expertise and interests and the choose their top 5 mentors
- SoC coaches could view the bootcampers choices to help them with the matching process
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, React, Express.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL. Cloud hosted using Heroku and Netlify.
Winner of project week with praise for Design and UX.
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Working in an Agile way with daily stand-ups and retro's. We used Trello to implement a Kanban system with a backlog of tasks which we prioritised and assigned to different team members each day. After we finished the whole project we had a retro the following week to reflect on what went well and where we could improve. It was really helpful and definitely informed my decision making since.
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Document everything! We made the mistake of getting rid of our initial Disney Ideation notes once we'd decided on the end product which wasn't a disaster but in hindsight it would have been interesting and useful to have kept them somewhere to refer back to later or to show in our presentation.
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You can never plan enough! I think we jumped in to coding a little too soon on the first day which meant that at the start of Day 2 we went back to our plan and filled it out with more details to make sure that as a team we were on the same page. Having not worked in a team of four before, or on a project this long, we maybe didn't realise how much communication about the plan was needed. It was a really valuable learning point.
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Creating a presentation about our product and presenting it to a panel of experts. We talked about our brief, how we solved the problem, our planning phase, how we managed the project in an Agile way, the technologies we used, any problems we encountered, we gave them a tour of the end product and then took questions at the end.
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We got really confident at using GitHub, making branches, merging and clearly communicating about the work being done
- Create a login for the View Bootcampers page so that only the SoC coaches can see the mentor choices that the bootcampers have made
- Make a mobile version of the the app which works well on phone