Week 7 Retrospectives

Group Status Report

Status

Morale

Inidividual Status Reports

Alberto

• What went well:
  

  The team worked incredibly fast on the first couple of features, allowing us to be ahead of schedule. We have a great collaborative environment, where everyone is willing to help and do their part.

• What I learned this week:
  

  It is important to always have a good understanding of the technical side. Also, an architecture diagram should not be too simplistic as it undermines the work done by the developers.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I want to put more focus on understanding the technical side of the application, which is why I plan on helping out on some of the coding in the coming weeks. Also, for part of this week I had to put my tasks to the side given other commitments. In the future, I want to anticipate it and avoid having to delay starting my work.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Feeling great for how the team has taken on coding: they are all working very efficiently. Messaging is taking longer than other features, but is also the most important feature of the application, so I am not concerned by it taking its time. I am not feeling great for my tasks as I had to put them to the side for a couple of days. I feel like it was not fair to the team given how hard they have been working on the project. I will get back on track this weekend.

Alex

• What went well:
  

  Our team has been working really hard on all fronts. In particular, the subteam working on user creation and login seemed to work quite efficiently, also resolving issues that were cross-cutting for the whole group, such as figuring out how to serve our previewed app properly on a PR, how to set up our loval envrionment files, and applying styling for our app. For messaging, the pace has been a bit slower due to road blocks with testing, but we now have the feature working properly locally.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned a bit more about the difference between frontend and backend. Although we've had readings on these topics, it's still not clear to me exactly where the line is drawn to distinguish between the two. Through working on our backend API, I've come to understand the distinction somewhat better. The confusing part for me was - when I'm writing code, how do I know if what I'm doing is frontend or backend development? In the past, it has been more clear cut, as separate folders and files helped to distinguish this for me. In addition, I think the distinction was more clear cut because in the past I've used vanilla JavaScript with explicit GET and POST requests, with some code sending the requests and others receiving them. However, I think the distinction between frontend and backend was blurrier for me with this project because we're using the Firebase SDK in lieu of things like explicit GET and POST requests.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Ideally I would like to be working faster and making more meaningful contributions, but I'm not sure what else I can be doing to achieve this. I think one thing that's been useful and that I can do again is to do some work independently. I've been sinking a good amount of time into researching topics on react and different testing libraries, but this continues to not make much of a difference in my effectiveness in a pair programming session, because I still haven't actually explicitly trialed and errored different things. Instead of investing my time trying to understand these topics by reading examples and posts, I think a better use of my time that would make me a more effective teammate would be to just dive in and get my hands dirty trying out small examples on a feature branch.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  I'm really happy to be working with such capable, accountable, and friendly teammates. However, I'm still experiencing a lot of guilt and frustration over feeling inadequate and not knowing how to resolve it. I've been in many situations that required me learning new technical things on the fly, and I don't feel like I've ever been unable to deliver in those situations until this project. I think I really need to change my approach, because otherwise, my claims that I'm able to pick things up on the fly and that I am uncontent when I'm not meaningfully contributing will sound like empty words.

Chang

• What went well:
  

  This week my teammates Edward and Alex are working on message function and they finished a fixed room chat. After several changes, This function will work on private chat room.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned how to use Lucid to draw a diagram and finished our Architecture Diagram.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  Do more tasks to finish our project early.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Feeling good this week.

Dian

• What went well:
  

  One important thing we figured out was the firebase configuration setup. We managed to set up all three different configurations (main, dev, and local) within the Github using Github workflows and gitignore. The workflow will generate a corresponding .env file that will be used for each environment.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned that Firebase deployment does not seem to have a server that we usually have for an application, which makes it harder to set up the environment variables that will be used during the runtime. Luckily, we got some libraries in our pocket that will help setting up the Firebase configuration envrionment variables.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I should not hesitate to use the existing library to do the task I wanted to do on my own. It takes much less time and will be more reliable. But it was also a good learning experience as I learned that the conventional way of setting up the global environment variable is not applicable to Firebase deployment.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  I have faith in the team and everyone does their parts well. I am confident that we will deliver the project on time and it will be perfect.

Edward

• What went well:
  

  Overall, for the messanging team, we refactored our code to use just native firestore calls instead of firestore hooks. Although the hook library was a lot easier to implement, it was 100x harder to test. After refactoring our code, we were able to make more progress on the messanging side.

• What I learned this week:
  

  Creating a listener to firestore is super easy and I should definitely refactor some of my older projects ^^||

• What can I do to improve:
  

  In terms of timeline, I feel like the messanging team is a bit behind. Would like to pick up the pace a little!

• Inidividual morale:
  

  Feeling ok! Will put in a bit more time this upcoming week.

Jason

• What went well:
  

  This week we didn't do much coding because we finished strong last week. I did offer help to the other half of the team to help them out. Overall, the development is going smooth.

• What I learned this week:
  

  I learned about more Jest testing, backend and frontend.

• What can I do to improve:
  

  I should have reached out earlier to help my team.

• Inidividual morale:
  

  All good but getting frustrated with testing.