The HP File Browser
Introducing Rat Development
Rat Development, which I had the pleasure of naming, is the first Scrum team I have ever been a part of. 10 strangers and a Scrum captain with various levels of coding experience and talent assigned to create a system file browser for Hewlett and Packard (yeah like the company). Honestly, this was a very intimidating prospect for me. I had no experience in full stack development and my success was determined on how helpful I could be to the team. It was sink or swim, and I cannonballed on in.
Our Tech Stack
In deciding our tech stack many of my team members suggested components they had used before. I however, had used nothing before, so I advocated for what I wanted to become good with. Primary of these was React, a front end tool I new was popular among many companies. And with my advocation I accidentally set myself up to be the chief front end engineer, despite my lack of experience. However, it put me in a position where I needed to understand the app entirely in order to communicate the UI to everything else, forcing me to understand the goLang API and Cassandra database.
One for All and All for One
I quickly came to realize that working in an Agile team was the greatest blessing of my junior year. I was surrounded by brilliant peers, many with internship and real world experience. I feel I played an important role in bringing the team together, always doing my best to make everyone feel warm and welcome. Without fear of sounding dumb, I also went out of my way to ask all the questions I could come up with, siphoning as much knowledge as I could from my brilliant team. Most importantly, I was the team member who suggested weekly meetup times. The point of these meetups was simple, you weren't expected to show up. But if you wanted to work on trello cards, if you wanted to learn about the tech stack, or if you wanted to simply hangout and joke around, I would be there. With these meetups our efficiency grew but more importantly, these people stopped being my teammates and quickly became my friends.
My Improvement
In the span of a few months I went from clicking through Git and React tutorials to explaining how branch merging works and evaluating if redux was required to make our index page work correctly. I took on the frontend, developing a functioning user interface and single handily completing several of the project requirements asked of the product owner. Through my teammates and my own effort, this project drastically increased my coding skill and confidence changing my view of myself as a computer science student and my future in this industry.
