Adventures at Makers Academy
Yesterday the team came over to mine to work and it was a very long, but productive day. We discovered some errors with multiuser authentication being saved properly to the database but managed to solve it by the end of the day.
In other news, I'm feeling a bit meta at the moment. I feel like I'm able to reflect back upon the last ten weeks and am in awe of how far not only I, but everyone in my cohort have come.
After much-ado about Travis and Coveralls it feels bloody good to see passing badges and 93% coverage out of the box.
On top of Devise and Omniauth we're now using Octokit to perform the organization checks. It should've been a simple integration, and technically it was, our code worked fine in a live environment. However, our tests all fell flat.
I used this and this awesome pair of blog posts to scaffold my implementation.
Work progresses steadily on our final project. TDD is paramount in our workflow, if we were just spiking code we could be much farther ahead at this stage but we would pay the price down the line.
My personal challenge was creating a secure Github login that also verifies membership to the appropriate organizations on Git to grant access.
Yesterday we managed to get our Github signin working using the Omniauth gem and today we spent the first half of the day experimenting with setups to mock the authentication properly in our tests.
Today the whole team was rearing to go, we want to get as much done as quickly as possible so we have time to troubleshoot and add extra functionality before the deadline next Friday.
We also finished off the rest of our planning, technologies and workflow. After speaking to those who have gone before us we opted against AngularJS and instead going with pure Rails, we will no doubt have to be flexible if any golden opportunity arises.
We obviously needed a kanban board and ticket tracker so we decided to try Waffle. Below is where our board stood at the start of the day.
For the next two weeks we'll be doing final projects. Our 4-man team was given an initial brief for a website to store and display code tutorials and resources with ratings but we've been let off the leash to expand or modify the idea to be what we want it to be.
Feature creep is something we all want to avoid and today was mostly spent in discussions amongst ourselves and with the coaches to try and pin down an MVP.
There's nothing quite so lovely as a warm, sunny, summer's day in England.
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We've got the weekend off, hooray!
I watched The Other Guys, Step Brothers and The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smaug.
Today we finish off our 3-day assignment to create a web app to automate pair programming of cohorts at Makers. Lots of challenges faced and overcome and I'm so proud of the whole team for working our collective butts off.
Fresh from completing our 4-man hackathons we've been plunged into something even more terrifying, a 10-man assignment. Even though we may never be in such a large team ever again it does give us a chance to encounter, overcome and anticipate similar problems in future.
1000 commits on Git!
Today we finished off Gym Buddy and all teams had to present their hackathon websites. It's been an intense and very rewarding couple of days.
The next two days are Makerthon, sort of like a hackathon but more makery. We start the day pitching projects and forming groups then quickly jump into making things happen.
The team I got on is making an app called Gym Buddy, to let people find suitable people to go to the gym with or make new friends doing so.
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