Building Something From Scratch — Week 1
(This story is part of the weekly assignments for my internship at Nearsoft. I hope that some of the insights I learned this week can help others in their learning journey. Previously: Month 1.)
During this phase, we were arranged in teams and assigned into different projects. We are going to build something from scratch, which is easier said than done. This phase will have 4 deliverables in which we will Research, Design, Code, and Build but specially we will Work as A Team.
As soon as the team was assigned, we had a meeting. We had already “met” each other. Even if it was online, we already had an idea of who our teammates would be. At the same time, there was so much we didn’t know about each other and how the team dynamics would play out. This first meeting went out great, the next day we were to meet our client.
Meeting the Client 🔬
During this meeting expectations were high, we had to display skills that we learned during the Reset Phase. The meeting entailed some introductions and then, we reviewed the Requirements. Overall, I felt a little nervous during this meeting not only because of the pressure of making a first good impression. But, because my actions and comments would also impact the team.
The meeting went well, we asked questions to have a better understanding of the client’s idea. Then, we had a team meeting were we began to propose and discuss different technology stacks. However, we noticed that whatever we choose, some of the team would have to learn a completely new stack during this phase. At the end, there was a consensus and we moved on to create a Github repo.
Setting the Cornerstone 🏗
The following days, we continued building the foundations of the project. We wrote User Stories and linked them to Milestones. We implemented CI into our project through GitHub Actions and ran our first test. We wrote our Vision document and build the skeleton of our project. Finally, we were ready to present it to client. The meeting went smoothly and the first week was over.
Challenges 🧗🏻♀️
During these past seven days, there were a lot of tasks that successfuly happened. However, this doesn’t mean that they were smoothly done. What I mean is, at every new task we all learned new things, struggled and, had discussions about it. Personally, this past week I learned a lot by working as a team and also by doing and getting a sense of the development process. This week completely took me out of my comfort zone, but that’s fine. This is were the learning happens.
