First Full-Stack Project
Being a student of DigitalCrafts, we are engaged in a full-time learning bootcamp where we spend our week days 9–5 building our software development skills. This week we were finally tasked with building our first full-stack web page. In this article I will go over generally how the project went, the process of working as a team, and any major blockers we faced during our week of development. I must emphasize that we are all new to back-end and did much learning/growing in the process.
The project requirements were to have a fully functional front-end (HTML, CSS, Javascript) that is completely responsive/mobile friendly. The project needed to have a complete back-end that uses Node/Express, Sequelize or an ORM that makes the DB and makes models, the data tables need to be joined, and there needs to be persistent user authentication throughout the site.
My team, (“Error By Night”) faced many blockers head on. We faced challenges in getting everyone tasked with a feature/assignment to work on. To be blunt, I don’t believe we made efficient use of our allotted time. There is a lesson to be learned in taking initiative and action somewhere here. To my estimation though, everyone in the team did the best with what circumstance and knowledge we had, and also learned form the process. Initially, our biggest set back was getting everyone on board and synced with our project branches on git hub. Through many facets of trial and error, we learned the proper procedures and protocols for working in an agile environment. These lessons are now ingrained in our minds quite thoroughly as a result. Another major blocker we faced was getting the user authentication implemented as designed. In general, working with databases and back-end code was a challenge for us all.
In summary, the project met the requirements that were given. The site is up and running, ready to be viewed by our community. We worked as a team, struggled as a team, and we learned lessons as a team. I believe we all benefited from this project and will use our experience to further sharpen our skills to become stronger software developers.
