It all comes together on Project Week...


Well it turns out that these CodeClan instructors do actually know what they're talking about!  I must admit I may have narrowed my eyes in doubt when they uttered those words, but it turns out they were completely right.


Working as a Team


We were split up into groups, Team PikaVue (all will become clear) consisted of Myself, Michael Anderson, Chris Kite and Marc Downie.  We were given 4 briefs to choose from, we settled as a team on producing an app that featured a card game.  Specifically Pokemon!  We decided to use the poke api that gave us all 1000+ pokemon, images, moves, health and lots, lots more! 

What's in a name?


For my non tech buddies (and those who don't have a 10 year old son with a whole folder filled with Pokemon cards) - our team name PikaVue - courtesy of Chris - is a mix of Pikachu (cuddly wee yellow Pokemon) and Vue - the Javascript framework we were using to build our app.

Agile Working


We quickly sorted ourselves out with a Trello board and decided our sprints would be 1 day long (necessary when your project is only a week long!).  We tagged each card according to the MoSCoW method of prioritisation and assigned a team member (or members if we were carrying out paired or mob programming).  

GitHub

Working collaboratively on GitHub with branches definitely took a bit of time to get used to -  if I'm honest, most of it was the fear factor of messing up Everyone's project - it wasn't just mine!  So I guess this is good practice for real life working - you don't want to mess up the whole company's code!!  We took our time and led each other through it, referring back to the notes several times and double checking everything three times!  I am pleased to report that we didn't break anything - phew!




The Project

I LOVED this project, it was so much fun and I learnt so much.  I loved our group dynamic, we all had different strengths and it was great being able to learn from the rest of the team and also being able to share some things that I'm passionate about.  I can't put into words the sense of satisfaction at reading the documentation for a new library that you've not used before, installing and importing it and seeing it work (there may have been a wee victory dance!). Working out how to format the data from your database and pass it into chart data for google charts so it dynamically refreshes when a Pokemon plays a game and wins or loses.  The total highlight though has to be when you code a reset button at the end of the project without having to refer to any notes,  setting event listeners in different components and resetting various values, basically navigating the Vue framework with ease and understanding every v-on:click and eventBus.$emit and how the data flows between components.  What a high!  And now I can say with certainty that on this mega intensive rollercoaster CodeClan ride....It all comes together on Project Week!  Here is a screen record of our app being played:  




Thanks to everyone who has read my blog over the past 10 weeks and for all your support.  I hope everyone has a peaceful and Merry Christmas and you'll see my next blog bright eyed and bushy tailed at the start of 2021!


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