We are on week 2 of the journey. I have just gotten to know my team as well as started the planning phase of the project. I have to say that a good team not only allows you to showcase your strength and actually makes you feel like you are contributing, but it also pushes you to learn new things.
Like I said on my first post, my team and I have chosen to partake in creating a pet adoption website, where a user can browse and eventually adopt any types of pet, spanning from cats, dogs, etc. This week was all about project planning, therefore my team and I ironed out exactly what it means to accomplish the project. This planning involved going over assigning tasks, defining goals, as well as figuring out what tools are needed, and etc.
During this period of time, I was able to familiarize with my teammates as well as see what they can bring to the table. I have to say both of my teammates were great. They were able to show gumption and were quick witted enough to where a lot of the steps mentioned above were done really quickly. For example, one of the tools that we needed for the project was a database, and rather than spending some days trying to figure it all out, on the same day that we were meeting for the first time, we discussed what the database should look like. As in how are we going to structure it and what not. It was a truly team experience, as everyone was working on the same shared documents and everyone was adding and sometimes removing database components as we discussed the merits of including them.
A mark of a good teammate is a teammate that will foster a good environment to where everyone feels like they are contributing as well as pushing everyone to learn new things. I have already discussed the first part, and no onto the second part. I will say that this problem of building a pet adoption web app isn’t really new. I mean that a lot of the stuff we will need to build it is not something that I haven’t seen before. But my team decided that instead of building the web app with vanilla Javascript and HTML, we decided on a framework, more specifically, React.
I have never used React and only one person in my group has experience with it before but we as a team still decided to go for it. Where did the confidence to do so come from? It was simply the fact that we had faith in each other’s capability. Because everyone demonstrated so far that they were able to get on top of things pretty quickly, and everyone also showed the ability to plan well, therefore, we felt that learning and using this new framework, that we have never used before, doesn’t seem much of a challenge. Basically the team-members felt that we wouldn’t really be slowed down by learning this new tech. So a lot of self-studying is needed and everyone agreed on doing it.
So the lesson learned from this week is that having good teammates will allow you to have a good time, and in my future software developer career I will try to focus on working with good teams. If I didn’t have my current teammates I would be still trying to figure out how to get everyone working together.
