Whew. It’s been a busy ride the past couple weeks. Every time I sit down to jot out a blog post I have no idea how it happens but I get side tracked. Whether it’s a project that I’ve been hashing out or just spending some time being present at home, something seems to get in the way.
Either way, I’ve been immersed in learning the past few weeks. I’ve gone from not knowing how to write a single line of code to creating all kinds of stuff and how it works. I can write Javascript. I can write in PHP. I can use a few Frameworks to help with both of those languages.
It’s all been technical learning up until this week, though. This week Bill Bruce, a Scrum Master, came in to speak to the class about Agile Workflow and Scrums. But wait a second… what?!?!?!
(Sounds like I’m not only learning to code, but I’m learning to play rugby at the same time!)
Honestly, though, the idea behind Agile workflow is pretty cool and it has me set up for the next two weeks as I get ready to try to conquer my final project for the Bootcamp class at Awesome Inc.
To plainly and very quickly explain Agile I’ve broken it down this way. Instead of looking at a project and planning with the end goal in mind, looking at a daunting task at hand, and never revisiting the planning process until the end when you may have to reevaluate, Agile sets things up to continuously plan and think about what your project will look like. So planning is always happening and you try to break up that process by breaking the project up into pieces or “sprints”.
Daily, there is a morning stand-up to update on progress from the day before, say where you’re headed today, and possibly what you might hit as a hurdle. (This could be hard to do in an individual project but I plan to write this stuff out and bounce ideas off the instructors for the class.) Really it’s a morning meeting where literally everyone is standing up so it doesn’t take too long.
And each piece of the puzzle is broken up into those aforementioned sprints. Little segments of the project that will help you methodically get to the end goal.
This is where I think I’m going to benefit from this approach the most. We technically have about 11 days to conquer the final project. With that in mind I hope to break the two weeks up into two 5 day sprints with leeway for a day added to the first or second. I’ll plan out exactly what I want to accomplish by the end of sprint one and reevaluate when I get there to be sure I’m staying on task and looking to get to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
My end project is going to be super ambitious for 11 days of coding for one person, but the idea is really fun and if I pull it off I think I can get a job pretty quickly.
Thanks for reading! Here’s a link to more information on implementing Agile.
I’m really looking forward to starting this project. I’ve already completed some bare-bones mock-ups and database schema.