So week 3 of Mayden Academy is over, and this week was our first full beginning-to-end site build. We were asked to design & create a portfolio website to showcase our skills to prospective employers, the coolest thing being that this was our first real implementation of Scrum from sprint planning to sprint retrospective, and all of the actual work in between. Also using Git within the context of an actual project made it seem a lot less scary (even if some of us had issues which had to be solved with...dark arts).
Hard stuff
I found the design aspect really challenging. Not only did I find it difficult to just to put pen-to-paper and decide on a wireframe, about halfway through the sprint I realised that I needed something very different to my design and spent about 15 minutes figuring out if I could start again (which, of course, I couldn't). So I had to carry on unhappy with it.
Good stuff
As much as I struggled with the design, I learned a lot from it (and let's be honest, that's why I'm at the academy). I tried to cram content into every part of the page, rather than exploit space & images, and also figured that it wouldn't be an absolute pain-in-the-arse to use portfolio images of varying sizes and aspects (of course it was). Also, I know that next time I'll try and make my initial page responsive to as many different screen sizes as possible before using a ton of media queries.
Other 'Good stuff' was that the team really embraced Scrum: nobody worked in their own world, we shared ideas & problems and the burden of code review was truly shared across the whole team. It was a refreshing way of working, and felt collaborative rather than competitive.
So overall some good stuff, some hard stuff, but we're still learning and growing and I can't wait to see what the next 13 weeks hold for us. And as much as I wasn't happy with my design, I still ended up satisfying all of the requirements. MVP, innit.
In scary news, at the end of this week we will already be a QUARTER of the way through...
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