While I was at Deb Bootcamp (DBC) we had a group project every Friday and on every project I was willing to defer to the group’s needs. I worked which ever part of the project I was asked and was often shifted from one part to another without finishing the previous section.
I’ve always tried to be a team player and half of DBC’s training was imparting on us the importance of working well as a team, but on our final project I feel like I missed some opportunities to learn.
I chose to produce the Dev Bootcamp API because it was so radically different from all of our other projects. During our time at DBC we only had to use the Twitter API and the idea of designing an API with so little experience was a daunting yet exciting task. This was especially difficult because this was the first TDD project that we’d ever worked on. So we were trying to TDD an API when we had no idea what was required to write an API. This was made more challenging as we had to adapt our project to allow DBC to change to a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) a third of the way into the project. All of DBC’s resources would now be accessed through the API we were designing for them.
As I said before I like being a team player. So I didn’t mind moving around on the project, but after words I realized that in doing so I let the more ambitious students claim the interesting parts of the project. I worked on some of the testing, serializing user endpoints, http authentication, and the documentation website. (See below)
http://developer.devbootcamp.com/
However, I never touched the gem or the omniauth strategy, which were amazing opportunities to learn.
I’m proud of the work I did on the API, and that I would quickly drop whatever I was doing to help unblock one of my other two teammates. But, I also learned a lot about myself and that if it isn’t vital to the project that I need to push more to take the assignments with the greatest opportunity to learn.
Reading my partners code will show me how it was done and can be a good guide for future work, but it can’t replace the eureka moments of struggling with a project and fighting through the concepts you have yet to understand.