Learning Journal | Nearsoft Academy | Week 5
October 26th — November 2nd
Hello! 👋 This is my fifth-week takeaways being part of the Nearsoft Academy program, a space to learn, practice, and grow. I’ll post every week, all about the topics I’ve learned during this adventure.
I’m a visual and kinesthetic person, so you will see some sketch notes here, I hope you enjoy them, and also, feel free to share if they were useful for you.
Last week, we started a new journey: Build Something From Scratch Phase, the goal of this phase is to learn the software development cycle, agile practices, and of course teamwork.
Talk with a client
To start the phase, the team and I had a kick-off with our clients, she explained to us what she needs on the new system, in this session, we discuss how the process is happening right now, solving our doubts about what the clients visualize the project.
One important part is knowing what to ask, to avoid getting compromised with complicated solutions that can take more time or effort than the one we actually have.
What should we do?
As a team, after the kick-off we had different meetings to determine what we should develop, to cover the client requirements considering time, effort, and knowledge.
In this part is so important to have good communication, speak without fear, and say our opinion in order to define a good project for the team and the client.
How can we organize our GitHub repository?
Gitflow is a git workflow that defines a branch model, it is about how a team can work with branches to manage projects.
It is just a suggestion, teams adapt it to them, but it definitely made the things clearer to me.
In our team, we decided to use this workflow, so when we start a new task, we will create a new branch that will be merged (after being tested) into the develop branch, then we will test everything together on the develop branch and finally, we will merge develop to master.
Continuous delivery? Continuous integration?
These 2 concepts are new for me, and they are basically this:
Continuous integration (CI). Automate some tests when a team member creates a commit, so the team member can integrate new code into a project assuring quality.
Continuous delivery (CD). It happens at the end of the CI cycle, so when the tests are done, it automatically delivers the integrated code into a production environment.
I want to write code, but where should I start?
We were a bit confused at the beginning, we wanted to start working and developing features but, we didn’t know where to start, where should I create a page? how should I name a file? where would I create a component?
Well, one of the mentors told us that we would start organizing how we will work: defining the project routes, the file structure, the workflow, and all f the things we need to start writing code, so after that, we had a meeting where we defined that and we write it down, so everyone in the team could have access to it and remember our agreements to be sure that all of us are in the same page and we can keep working because we know where the things are.
Definitely, this new phase will be fun, we will learn a lot, and building something new is always interesting.
See you next week 😉
