Fhellow is the brain child of Alisa Afkhami, a freelance designer. Alisa found, like many freelancers eventually do, that whilst being a freelancer has many benefits it can also be a lonely profession. Freelancers are unable to tap into a professional network for contacts, benefits and social discourse, until now. Fhellow is a social networking site for freelance professionals. A place to connect and chat with Fhellow freelancers and build a professional network without an office.
#####Development:
#####Design:
Ruth...
I think one of the most valuable learning experiences we will all take away is working with a client with real expectations. Alisa had a very clear idea of the apps purpose which made the process of planning and execution fairly straight forward. We followed mock-ups of the website and they were great for the frontend development of the web app.
I also enjoyed pair-praogramming on this project as it meant we could collaborate and work as a team whilst building the MVP. I feel I learned more because of pairing as I was able to quickly clarify thinking, build on ideas and maintain workflow more effectively than when coding alone.
Michelle...
It was a great experience creating the Fhellow website for our final Makers Academy project. In particular I learned a lot about practising agile techniques and the benefits gained from working in an agile environment.
The techniques we used during the two week project sprint were:
- Stand up meetings every morning
- Product demo’s every evening
- Listing tasks on a kanban board (using Trello) and tracking the progress of each task
- Pair programming with regular rotations so that every team members understood all parts of the project
From early in the project it became evident how much agile principles were contributing to the project’s success. We were able to quickly pick up new tasks once current tasks were completed, understand what team members were working on and we could easily be responsive to project changes. Working in an agile manner is something I will definitely continue practising in the future.
Jerome...
One interesting thing I learned a lot about was communicating with a non-developer who also had a lot of input, this required us to simplify technical subjects to a suitable level, and helped to deepen our own understanding.
During development I gained a new appreciation for what jquery and other front-end technologies can do, previously I had been much more drawn towards the back-end, but I am now aiming to become a full-stack developer.
Some key lessons I learned during the first week of the project were: keeping a very close eye on our tests, and to commit regularly. Towards the second week of the project it was easy to notice how our improvement in those areas made us much more efficient.
Maya...
Working on Fhellow was a really valuable experience for me because it was so challenging and drew on all the skills I have learned at Makers. I enjoyed working on all aspects of the project - both front end and back end - and would also be keen to become a full-stack developer.
I learned that teamwork is all about communication. As a team, we were constantly discussing ideas and offering each other help and advice through pair programming, our morning standups and evening demos, and consequently we were able to build a functioning app in less than two weeks.
#####Built with:
- Ruby on Rails 4
- PostgreSQL
- HTML
- CSS3
- JavaScript
- JQuery
- Mustache.js
- Devise
- Paperclip
- Omniauth
- GMaps.js
- Geocoder
- (Bootstrap)
- Amazon AWS S3
######Test-driven with:
- RSpec-Rails
- Capybara
- Jasmine
######Deployed with:
- Heroku
- Heroku secrets
Before running the app you will need to set your own secret keys in
config/secrets.yml, as follows:
secret_key_base: *****
facebook_secret: *****
AWSAccessKeyId: *****
AWSSecretKey: *****
After cloning the repository cd into the freshly cloned directory and run bin/rails s, then open your browser of choice and in the address bar, type localhost:3000.