Labs Retrospective - Week 1

February 15, 2019

Part 1 - Individual Accomplishments this Week

This was a … interesting week. We really didn’t have much opportunity to write up any actual code, as our codebase was basically setup for us. This is completely new territory for me (along with my team), so I had to radically shift my view on what productive work is.

For this week, I spent the majority of my time reading on GraphQL, Auth0, MongoDB, and what environmental variables we need to actually get the original site working. It went alright, but I have to be honest, it was quite painful not being able to do any actual code this week due to not being able to actually understand the technology base the old team was using. We also had tremendous difficulty even utilizing the site after we made a development branch off of the main branch, due to not having the right environmental variable structure that the previous team had, not being able to communicate with that previous team, and having the docs (while very good compared to what I am used to) be incomplete in explaining what Auth0 is actually looking for in our codebase.

I think Auth0 was our biggest stumbing block.😕

Tasks Pulled

Since our project requires us to add on new functionality to an already existing app, my goal this week was to understand the existing code. As such, all of my pull requests this week either adds comments to existing code or updates READMEs in order to better help my teammates:

Ticket 1: Added comments to Readme.md

Ticket 2: Even more comments!

Ticket 3: Actually did something useful - redirected our repo to the right backend

Ticket 4: Last pull, env variable update

Detailed Analysis

Yikes, this whole week was difficult for me. Need that dog above to keep me sane, for real. But Ticket 4 was me finally breaking down and asking the original team for help. I should probably screen shot our convo on zoom, but we as a team basically decided that enough was enough, and wasting another day (after using up 3 days of dev time) on trying to blindly get Auth0 was not possible. So I went ahead and contacted the previous team for some help deploying with Auth0, and they immediately sent their old env variables, even though that was supposed to be an internal secret.

Goes to show you that sometimes, just asking for a little help can help solve your most intractable problems. I think we are still having a little issue with that, but I think that now, we can at least get something up on our personal development machines.

(editor note: add like 3 screenshots or something)

Part 2 - Milestone Reflections

So, I think our Milestone this week was to work on TDD and complete it, and get something up and running on our project.

So, TDD. I am actually really proud of my work on this, because I designated myself scribbler-in-chief. I wrote out most of the document in its roughest form, and let Bondor, Elieen, and Nedim clean it up, shorten and tighten it. I provide the rock, roughly chisel out what it needs to look like, and let the rest add the details and the prettiness. It was very effective, and I think we knocked it out of the park. I only hope that we can actually do most of what we put out to accomplish. If we can actually get Auth0 to work and our database to properly link up to the backend, we might have something beautiful come out of week 2.

For the whole competitor thing, we basically as a team built a team BaseCamp project, and checked out the Docs feature they had. It is basically what we are going to build out, and boy, was it fun to use. It was a really cool component, and we came out with a newfound appreciation of how deceptively simple it was as a feature, and how much work we probably will have to put in just to get it to work.

Again, this points to my original frustration: I want to get that to work right away, but for now, there is nothing I can do on it until I actually get access to the overall site itself, but we keep getting blocked by Auth0. I think our team will just have to bash our heads against the wall this weekend until we can breakthrough to the other side.

Written by Kai Lovingfoss who lives and works in San Francisco building useful things.