Building Something from Scratch — Overview

Building Something from Scratch has officially finished. I’m glad to have participated in this project. During this month, I learned invaluable information, lessons, and practices that hardly I could learn in other ways. Also, I meet better my teammates and I discovered the knowledge and good willing of them.

Agile practices were fundamental to organize the team and reach the goals in the time we had. I could mention the role that each practice impacted in my team and me during this month.

• Pair programming: Thanks to pair programming I got useful skills for software development and solving problems. For example, I learned to use Google Chrome dev tools for debugging.
• Continuous integration: Because of the nature of the project, we had to code, test and deploy at the end of the project. The project was deployed but we were improving the project with new features.
• Frequent small releases: Every week we had project demonstrations, so we could get feedback quickly and incorporate feedback for the next demo.
• Retrospectives: At some point in the project, we were getting stuck and we weren’t getting the results that we wanted on time. But thanks to the retrospective, we could improve our organization and cooperation.
• Standups: They were useful. We could get better communication among us because of them.
• Story cards: They were a fundamental tool to organize and prioritize our workflow and tasks.

I think that I learn a lot of technical skills related to ReactJs. I learned to use Axios (post, get and patch), I understand the main hooks of ReactJs, and how to give style to the frontend of the project. It was funny to understand how React applications work and being able to cooperate in a project like this is awesome.

Axios is a wonderful library used to make HTTPS requests. It makes it easier to get communication with the backend and server. Hooks seem to be essential for software development in React, and when you understand them it makes better the development.

It was a good experience to learn ReactJs and I liked to use it for the project. It gave me the will to keep learning about web development and JavaScript. And also make me understand how valuable are frontend developers.

As software developers, we can improve the lives of people. In this case, we were trying to improve the processes of the Food Bank of Hermosillo. This improvement would impact the lives of the employees of the food bank and the lives of the people that depend on the bank. I’m happy because I’m involved in this project.

Thanks to this project and the video “Optimistic bias”, I understood how important is to get real with our goals and keep our feet on the ground. It’s important to keep the expectations realistic. It is for the good of the relationship between developer and client. When we didn’t reach the goal for the first demo. I understood that we have to think about the goals of the project and the capacities of the team and the time we have.

In conclusion, this experience was very enriching for me. I learned a lot about how a software project should work, how to deal with a client, and how to overcome the challenges that exist in a project like this.