A Year In Review
13 Dec 2022
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
When first beginning this course I had no idea what to expect, and after hearing about the WODs and seeing the amount of work that had to be done I was worried about taking this course along with my various other classes. However, most of the assignments were reasonable in length and only took about 30-40 minutes to complete and many of the WODs were very similar to the practice WODs we got to do each week. This class introduced me to many new topics from basic coding in JavaScript to web development. Our final project was to design a web application that we named Manoa Eateries in a group of four people. This project brought forth the idea of agile project management and design patterns.
We learned about a type of agile project management called issue driven project management. This is a very useful method to use when working with a group of people as it keeps the work well organized and allows for flexibility amongst the team. Issue driven project management allows the work to be divided into tasks where everyone can take a task and when completed select other tasks that are waiting to be done. This is also a good way to manage projects as there are weekly or biweekly milestones that help to keep you on the right track and give you an idea of where you need to be. Another topic related to group work is the idea of design patterns. This is applicable to any group related work as it sets a type of standard and blueprint for the team to follow. Especially when coding everyone has their own methods and ways they code so having that baseline of a design pattern allows for easier collaboration amongst the group. For our final project we used the meteor-application-template-react as a baseline for our application and adapted the code to fit our needs. Having worked on many assignments using this template it was much easier for everyone to build off of it and understand the code that teammates used as it mostly followed the patterns that were used in the original template.
Adapting to New Standards
A very useful tool that I have learned from taking this course is coding standards. Coding standards are very important and allow for readable and understandable code. One of the coding standards we used throughout this course was ESLint which is used for JavaScript and will check for indentation errors, variable reassigning, unused variables and functions and various other things that will help improve your code. When going through other courses and getting assignments for a class where the code given to us has no proper indentation, sloppy code it’s very hard to follow and understand what’s happening in the code at first. It is possible to trace and understand it but it takes much longer to do than a code that follows a set of coding standards. Coding standards are important for any work that other people will view as it helps not only organize your own thoughts but also allows anyone else to have better understanding of your code also.