Project One: Taking the 'work' to the 'shop'

I know my topic seems a bit dramatic but follow me as I unveil my first team project in the Ada training. Before I begin, I would like to give you a brief introduction.

My name is Tamara, I joined the ADA training 8 weeks ago. I enrolled in the backend track of the training because I wanted to conquer my fear of backend engineering and improve my JavaScript knowledge. I am a Full-stack developer, right now, I am more like half-stack, but I stack. I was pushed by my amazing friend turned sister to enroll for the backend track of the training to give a backbone to my quarter Stack.

It's been an amazing 2 months of learning, unlearning and relearning. I have learned new techniques in JavaScript, made a console app, honed my writing skills, started a technical blog, collaborated effectively on GitHub and the list goes on and on. I even made a coding video to explain the logic behind my code. This is of worthy mention because I am super camera shy and avoid leaving my digital prints but that is a story for another day (stay tuned winks).

The Project Phase

The structure of the Ada Training places a demand on the practical application of knowledge. Every week we are given a new task that ensures we apply the knowledge gained in our weekly workshop and videos. At first, the backend track did not have weekly tasks or a means of weighing our understanding of our subject of interest.

Then, week 4 came and we (the Backend Track) were almost kicked out of the workspace (again, story for another day, you should stay tuned...) We got the project grouping and brief at the tail end of the week. I was placed in Team B with two amazing ladies and we were asked to create a console app that asks a user to fill in the name of a programming file and its extension, then our app would tell the programming file the extension belongs to. Here's a link to our project brief

My Project Experience

It was an amazing experience because I had amazing teammates and enjoyed the process. We met as a team to discuss the project. I came up with the logic to use the slice() and pop() methods on the user's response to a prompt() to write the name of the file and its extension.

A snippet of my code

const splited = userFile.split(".");
let extension = splited.pop();

The other group members were tasked with the responsibility to research the programming languages and their extensions a function was then created to store the if...else statement that logs the name of our files by its programming language on the console. The remaining snippets of the code can be found here.

The project phase was a major stretch as I had to be in school for at least 9 hours per day.

Challenges

1. We had a difficult time picking a convenient time to hold meetings. We even set a meeting by 4:30 am at some point.

2. One member's laptop broke down during the project week. Our team lead had just bought a laptop and did the sweet thing of sending her former laptop to our teammate. In the meantime, she was tasked with documentation, research and updating our ReadMe file.

3. During our presentation, our Team Leads laptop just started acting up, we did not present at the designated time. We were, however, given a second chance to present our project.