Day 8 of 100 Days of Code & Scrum: First Week is Finally Over!

Happy weekend, everyone!

Today marks the end of the week, and so I will be doing a Sprint Review and Retrospective as I said I would at the beginning of this challenge.

My Previous Weekly Sprint Goals

For reference, here were the Sprint Goals for this week:

• prepare for and go through 5 phone screening/interviews at different companies
• learn to use GraphQL and ApolloClient
  • would be happy if I learned how to query data to the client-side
  • mutate data
  • learning more is always okay
• get through the howtographql tutorials
• study GraphQL documentation along the way

How much of these have I accomplished?

Weekly Review

I believe I've met most of my Sprint Goals for this week, but it honestly could have been better.

In any case, here were the things I've done:

• go through 3 phone screening/interviews at different companies (2 of them I just withdrew)
• I learned to use frontend GraphQL and ApolloClient
• I can somehow utilize:
  • ApolloClient to initialize an ApolloClient object which will be used by React components via the Context API
  • createHttpLink to create the HTTP link that connects the Apollo client with the GraphQL API
  • useQuery and useLazyQuery for retrieving data from the server
  • useMutation to alter the data in the server-side
  • GraphQL subscriptions for listening to listen to events via WebSocketLink
  • interacting with the ApolloClient cache using readQuery and writeQuery
• I read through The Scrum Guide 2020 twice this week I think I'm very much familiar with all of the concepts.
• I've done some extra learning what each role in the Scrum Team would do in a real-world setting.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Weekly Retrospective

Moving on, let's tackle what I've managed to do well, what my shortcomings are, and what I could do better next time.

What Went Great

• I met my learning goals for GraphQL and ApolloClient, and even went for more.
• Got through some interviews, and I got to the last phase for one of them.
• I'm a lot more familiar with Scrum and can recall a lot of concepts.

Some Mistakes I've Made

• applying to too many companies.
• scheduling too many interviews, which made me decline some of them.
• fatigued myself too much from dealing with too many things (code, scrumstudy, blog, social media, emails).
• checking notifications too much and distracting myself from focusing on one thing at a time.
• failing to distribute and prioritize which tasks are more important.

Things I Could Improve On

• most likely check emails, social media, and blog on a set schedule instead.
• I should probably install something that blocks me from checking certain sites at a specific time.
• prioritize tasks that are more likely to help me meet my weekly goals.
• try to make additional changes to whatever tutorial I'm following to help enforce learning.

First Week is Finally Over!

I'm glad that I managed to get through this first week and commit to most of my goals this week.

However, I will admit that this is pretty brutal because I'm forced to work on concrete goals rather than just learning aimlessly. It was draining, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of this. I'm hoping to apply the things I've learned from here on.

Thank you to everyone who followed me and interacted with me during the past week!

Good luck on your developer journeys, and I wish you the best. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Image by June Laves from Pixabay

Resources/Recommended Readings

• The Fullstack Tutorial for GraphQL
• Apollo Docs
• The 2020 Scrum Guide
• Mikhail Lapshin's Scrum Quizzes

DISCLAIMER

This is not a guide, it is just me sharing my experiences and learnings. This post only expresses my thoughts and opinions (based on my limited knowledge) and is in no way a substitute for actual references. If I ever make a mistake or if you disagree, I would appreciate corrections in the comments!

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