Day 22

Offsite Practice (Hackathon)

Today I went to my first offsite practice. This is where you code something that can be used for the company within a day as a team.

We decided to code an Image-guessing game.

The day was set-up in an Agile manner which began with the creation of the user stories:

User stories are an Agile tool which allows you to envisage the project from the user perspective and create the project goals and sub tasks always with the user in mind.

So we decided how the user was going to play the game and in pairs created ideas on how we can split these into 5 tasks:

Aim of the game:

Image of holiday destination is displayed with 3 answers to choose from. The user shall click on an answer and if correct, will +1 to the score and repeat, but if false game-over.

Sub tasks:

• Project set-up (setting up the git hub file directory for all to clone)
• API set-up (find the calls to the APIs for the image and place name retrieval)
• Backend (Format the APIs into usable code to communicate to the frontend)
• Frontend (using React)
• Score and High-score logic

These tasks were split between 5 pairs and every half an hour, one person from the pair rotated, meaning an hour on each task per person.

I really enjoyed this rotation and pair programming as it meant you got to work with lots of different people and got a better feel of how the project links together from its 5 components. And despite not being able to contribute much myself (can’t javascript), I gained a better understanding of how to set-up a project, through using git, node.js and next.js.

Everyone was working on the same working directory which was frequently being, pushed, pulled and merged onto the remote Github repository. This was was valuable to see in practice and could be something that is implemented into a group apprentice task in the future.

The task was a success, and despite the APIs calling pictures that were at times too vague to guess the location, the game worked! :)