Learning journal — Week 8 takeaways
by Mayra Lucero GarcĂa RamĂrez
17/11/2020–23/11/2020
This was the fourth and last week of the second phase “Build Something from scratch” 🔨 at the Nearsoft Academy. It has been a challenging week.
Through this week, the team and I have been working on the project. We did not focus on a lot of functionalities, for the second demo we had to develop some points that apparently were not that clear on the team, so we got to work to be in time and manner with the project.
In the last sprint, we did a great job and we started working with tasks of this final sprint. By the Wednesday of this week, we had pretty much everything cover, just testing, documentation, minor fixes, and of course the deployment.
I am going to dedicate some lines to the deployment, personally I have done a couple of deployments, of personal projects or things like that, simple things, in Heroku, it was pretty easy. But this week, I learn several things, one of them is that deployments can be really hard and can have a lot of trouble, and that takes time to correct things like that.
Let me explain a little why I learned these things and how they lead me to learn more about CORS. Everything was good, we had the project locally running with cookies; and maybe it was our fault not to research more this part, but we surely won’t make this mistake again; but when we manage to deploy everything, it did not work.
Here is why: Heroku does not easily let use cookies, there are a lot of things that we tried (and google), ask other developers, ask for help, nothing work.
So we had to do something, the deployment was not an option, so we talk with our mentors and decide to use local storage, considering the risk that this implies. We finally got it to work, we had trouble and took us the rest of the week, but we did it.
It was a hard week, I also have to mention that I learned from my team, resilience and stay together, we try to help with our knowledge and attitude. I also learned from my mentors, more about APIs, requirements and clients. The hands-off went well, we manage to get everything to work properly, as it should.
Apart from this I also watched some other videos of the phase:
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder — Nassim Taleb — Animated Book Review 💎, I had already watched it but did not write about it. The concept of this video, talking about how and antifragile things get stronger when receiving an attack. It is an idea that comes with getting something wrong, make mistakes, fail, and use it to grow, learn and become antifragile. This has a lot to do with all that we learned in the first phase, and everything that is passing in the second one, everything that we have been learning, the mistakes through the project, everything leaves some lesson..
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, this one was interesting, especially the idea “something robust will survive”, something large becomes very fragile.
The optimism bias 👍🏽
This one has an especial emphasis on what we under and overestimated. Optimism, has this effect on our life, in expectations and in how we are rewarded mentally. The interpretation of what happens matters to us and even though we may want to lower our expectations to be less disappointed or more excited about the results, optimism is related to success, so we need it to work and achieve success too.
Agile practices đź’ˇ
This series of videos is pretty interesting, I consider I knew some things and others were mentioned in the lightning talks at the last phase or explained by my mentors at some point. I found particularly interesting the roles and their importance in the development, personally I felt that on the project a product owner would have helped us a lot.
The phase 🔨
This phase was enriching, in soft skills, project management, organization, technical, a lot of things. Mainly, I learned about teams and how they are sustancial to develop a project and nothing will work without a good team, good communication and availability to help and solve problems.