First Community Project

Over the past weekend I participated in my first community project with a bunch of devs I've never met before.

Saturday

Showed up around 9:30am at SkySlope. The organizers of the project first discussed the project and their idea of how we could organize around 20 devs across all aspects of the project. We had a small DevOps team who got the database setup on AWS and built the database structure using SQL.

I was on the backend team that handled building out the routes, logic, and sql queries. We had about 10 people working on the backend over the course of the weekend. Pretty early on we decided to use Node as the majority of the team knew it. A more senior dev in the group started to stand up a Loopback server but it ended up being a bit more complex for the everyone to learn and use in a weekend. The decision was made to switch over the Express as it's much easier to work with and get a 0.1.0 project up and running quickly.

The front end team was also a larger team of devs and UI/UX people. They created some great designs and started building out the application in React.

Sunday

Much smaller team showed up on Sunday. Backend team consisted of about 5 people. Early on we distributed the workload across the team to complete the routes and make sure all the GET routes were working. Near the end of the day we got some POST requests working and started to narrow down the GET SQL queries so they didn't return all data but rather just the data that was needed.

It was a great experience learning the terminology and structure that a larger company and more senior devs use. There wasn't much formality on code structure or how to commit but we got a good amount of work done. I plan on working on the project over the next few weeks in hopes we can get the project ready to use for the city.