The goal of this project is to work together to build a “smart” shopping list that learns your shopping habits over time, putting items you are most likely to need to buy in the near future at the top.
This project is based on iNeedToBuy.xyz, a mobile web app Andrew built for his own use in early 2019.
- Site: Production Site
- Repo: github.com/the-collab-lab/tcl-15-smart-shopping-list
- Clone URL:
[email protected]:the-collab-lab/tcl-15-smart-shopping-list.git - Issue list: github.com/the-collab-lab/tcl-15-smart-shopping-list/projects/1
- Database: console.firebase.google.com/u/0/project/tcl-15-smart-shopping-list/firestore
The project is expected to take 40 hours per participant, spread over 8 weeks.
Each week, the team of 4 developers will split into 2 pairs of 2 developers each. Each pair will take on a story or task from the issues list to work on together that week.
Pairings will go as follows:
- Debora & Kenny
- Sarah & Hajar
- Hajar & Debora
- Kenny & Sarah
- Sarah & Debora
- Kenny & Hajar
- Debora & Kenny
- Sarah & Hajar
- Hajar & Debora
- Kenny & Sarah
- Sarah & Debora
- Kenny & Hajar
- Debora & Kenny
- Sarah & Hajar
- Hajar & Debora
- Kenny & Sarah
A portion of your dedicated hours each week will be spent pair programming with your partner — this is where the most magical collaboration happens.
Pair programming offers some really exciting opportunities to teach/learn from your partner, get a different perspective and/or insight on the issues you’re facing, and drive forward progress on your goals.
There is no one “right” way to pair program, but in general, you will meet with your partner on Zoom to work through the story or task you’ve chosen for that week. You’re encouraged to test out some different approaches to pair programming to see what works best for your and your partner’s collaboration styles.
Each week, we’ll get on a 1-hour Zoom call. The call will always start with a quick demo of the previous week’s work from each pair. This is a common practice on most software teams and also lets you practice talking about your work, which can come in handy in a job interview setting!
The way we use the rest of the time will vary based on whether it’s an even- or odd-numbered week, as follows:
- Demos/discussion (15 minutes)
- Learning module (30 minutes)
- Mentors meet with pairs to talk through approach to upcoming week’s work (15 minutes)
- Demos/discussion (15 minutes)
- Retrospective (30 minutes)
- Mentors meet with pairs to talk through approach to upcoming week’s work (15 minutes)
In our retros, we will share appreciations of our teammates as well as talk about what went well from a process perspective and what we could do to improve how we’re working together.
A week sounds like a long time in some ways, but part of working on a team is accounting for coordination costs. Let’s walk back our goal of demoing from the production URL on Sundays to see when different things need to happen.
- Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — Work out approach, research if needed, pair program
- Thursday — Complete story and ask for peer feedback
- Friday — Respond to/give peer feedback on PRs and ping mentors for feedback
- Saturday — Respond to mentor feedback on PRs
- Sunday — Demo on production!
Having watched many cohorts before yours, our advice is to front-load the work as much as possible in the first couple of days of each week. Some of the stories are trickier than they appear on the surface!
The project is organized in GitHub as a set of user stories, each with a description of the desired functionality as well as acceptance criteria (AC) that describe how you know whether the task or story is complete. You can find the stories on the project board on GitHub.
A task or story is “done” when the following are all true:
- The AC have been met
- Optionally, tests have been written to validate the “happy path”
- In the case of a UI feature, it has been reviewed for accessibility
- The code to complete the task or implement the feature has been reviewed and approved by the other pair of developers
- The Product Owner (i.e. one of the mentors) has accepted the work as satisfactorily meeting the requirements
The “backlog” (the collection of stories) represents the work needed to complete the project. At the point when all of the stories are done, we should have a working app!
It’s super helpful both to yourself and the mentors for you to document your work. This can prevent you from losing track of details or decisions you make with your pair buddy. It also allows mentors to catch up on your progress when you ask for help.
One of the first things you & your pair buddy should do each week is create a draft PR for your work. This allows you to have a conversation about the work right alongside the code. Coupled with questions and discussions about your approach in the issue itself, this is nice way of documenting your progress as you go.
Work will be done on feature branches in git. Branches should be named in the following way:
<initials of person 1>-<initials of person 2>-<short description>
For example:
stc-an-connect-to-firestore
The hypothetical example above has Stacie Taylor-Cima and Alejandro Ñáñez working together on connecting the app to Firestore. Each of them will be able to work on the feature branch independently, but only one of them will submit the merge request when the work is ready (described in more detail below).
When you’re ready to start work on a feature, one person in your pair should create a local branch following the naming convention above, then push the branch to GitHub so your pair buddy can pull it down to their local environment. The following steps should work to do just this:
git checkout -b an-example-feature-branch
git push -u origin an-example-feature-branch
When you and your pair partner have working code that you believe is ready to be merged to main and deployed, you will follow the following steps:
- Create a “pull request” (PR).
- Notify the other pair team in Slack that you have a new PR for them to review.
- Incorporate feedback from the other pair team into your work until both you and they are satisfied the code is ready to be merged.
- Request that one of the mentors review the PR for final approval.
- Once approved, merge the PR into
main. (Your code will be built and deployed to production automatically thanks to Netlify.) - Check your work on the production site.
- Celebrate! 🥳
Most of our team coordination will happen through the Collab Lab Slack team and, in particular, your team channel.
If you’re not already super familiar with Slack, no worries! Here are a couple of tips to help you use it like a pro!
- Threads threads threads! No, seriously, threads! 😅 Threads are great because they do 2 really helpful things: 1) They encapsulate conversations so future you is able to find both the question and the answer in one place, 2) They keep notifications to a minimum, giving people the option of following a conversation or not.
- Speaking of notifications, tag people in when you need their attention. “
@stacie, could you review this PR?” is better than “Can someone review this PR?” because the latter may not be seen for a while depending on the person’s notification settings. When you need to alert the whole channel to something, use@here. We also have groups set up such as@group-tcl-9and@group-tcl-9-mentorsas shortcuts to tagging in certain groups. Use them! - Use GIFs and emoji liberally! Communicating via text can come across really dry. Don’t be afraid to communicate a little emotion along with that question about React hooks! 🤪
Note: You can disable the animation of gifs and emojus in the Slack app itself. Visit the Slack Help Center to learn more.
I’m around 💯% sure I’m forgetting or glossing over something important, so please be noisy on Slack as things come up. The mentors and I will do our best to get you unstuck. Also, lean on each other for help as well! Finally, work in the open so everyone can benefit from your questions.
