Holiday/Phase 1 Progress - Blog 06

This week's Monday meeting fell on a snowy President's Day, so we ended up not meeting face to face as a group this week. This, in my opinion, set our team back a bit, because while the back-end team is in pretty good shape in terms of knowing how to work productively as a software team, I don't believe the front-end team can say the same.

Last time we met with out client (2 weeks ago), he told us that by today, we should be completely done the design process for phase 1, and should be ready to begin coding. The back end team was at this point last week and had our code skeleton set up and ready to be implemented. This week, we were able to split up the work among ourselves and was able to get a little head start on building the API calls that the front end will be able to use to send/receive our data. Everyone on the back end team has been working very well, and the issues that have been assigned to each of us all have progress made to them. My tasks are to build the parts of the API that involves the Speaker table in the database. In other words, I'm implementing the methods that can -- get a speaker, get all speakers, add a speaker, update a speaker, and delete a speaker -- to/from the database. This week, I spent my time learning the Go language and implementing the "Read" methods for the SpeakerAPI (getASpeaker, getAllSpeakers.) For Monday, my goal is finish implementing the "Write" methods (addASpeaker, editASpeaker, deleteASpeaker,) so that I can show the front end how to use my methods to get the data they need by Thursday.

The front end team showed up today with only their designs that they made 2 weeks ago, so I'm pretty sure all 6-7 of them haven't done anything to contribute to the project during the past 2 weeks (I don't even think they have a decision made regarding what language they are going to use.) This is why I regret not meeting in a group on the Monday holiday, because if we did, we would've had the opportunity to discuss what we wanted to have done for today.

I think the professor was equally unhappy how unprepared we seemed to be, showing up today, but once we showed him the head start we got with the back end, it seemed to balance out and he was, overall, happy with the progress being made. He honestly mentioned that we may not finish the project given the current pace we are on, but as long as we continue to work as a team, produce clean code, and execute an agile environment, it shouldn't hurt our grade too much.

For next week, (now that we have begun coding) our goal is to have Phase 1 done and able to present, that way we can begin looking into adding the features for the attendance counts (Phase 2.) This could be a challenge, because looking at the discussions occurring on our Slack channels along with what the front end team presented today, I became very clear that only 2 or 3 students on the UI team have any coding skills. If we can finish building the API by this coming Monday, Charles and I will definitely be migrating to the front end team to help them catch up with the code, to ideally be able to marry them together to have a presentable integration by Thursday.

This will be our first checkpoint, of the project, so I have no predictions as to what to expect we will need the week after, so stay tuned for more updates next week!