DEV Community

Cam Bui for Our Time For Tech

Posted on

Reflections on Week 2 of CodeCollab

We ended week 2 with a team sprint meeting. Here are my reflections on the week.

The Technical

In the first week, we spent time planning out what our MVP could look like and created issues/PRs to create our database. In the first week, we mostly worked either on local environment setup or in the same area of the stack.

In the second, we’re seeing a bit more divergence with the issues we’re working on. Some are implementing our core database structure to unblock the issues created in week 1. Others continued with their environment set up. I worked on setting up a wireframe for our MVP.

I will share a separate post about wireframing for developers later on.

Inter- / Intra-personal

As our tasks begin to diverge, I find that it is easier to lose track of what everyone else is working on. I worried that if I lost track of progress, I would not be able to help peers with their issues or to catch up with progress on other parts of the stack when I’m finished with my issues.

But Ms. Arit reminds us to practice being less judgemental of ourselves with this work. There is no need to feel ashamed of not knowing! She encourages us to ask for demos and help as needed. We can lean on each other for support.

I find that I am building more trust with myself, my abilities, and my teammates.

When technical issues came up this week, a peer was available to jump on a quick call to help me out or Ms. Arit would create a demo video for easy reference. When I was deliberating while reviewing someone else’s Pull Request, I referenced the threads and GH issues about the issue. When a peer had questions about some comments, we jumped on a call to discuss them.

Because discussions are tracked on GH and Slack and plans are explicitly written out, I find it easy to quickly get up to speed. It is also practice in trusting that I can get up to speed as needed.

After this week, I can see the value of leaning towards over-communication. It is one thing to collaborate with someone during pair programming sessions, but another to actively communicate across time zones spanning from PST and EST in the United States to GMT in Europe.

There were delightful moments of communication this week, but also moments where it seemed like I or someone else was posting into a void. To avoid the voids, I want to practice proactively communicating in the written form and vocalizing my process in our project slack channel in the upcoming weeks.

Top comments (0)