👾 👩💻 Welcome to Phase 4! 👩💻 👾
Posted on Jun 13th, 2022
The past few months have prepared you to take on the challenge ahead in these next four weeks. You may not feel ready, but you ARE.
Your goal in this phase is to design and build a real-world software product, working collaboratively on a small team using agile development practices and all the tools you’ve already learned, and some you will learn as you go.
At the end of the phase, your team will present your product to an audience of local tech professionals, hiring partners, and the Momentum community.
The experience of working on a team during this phase and the product you build will form the foundation for your job search. The people skills you’ll use will be just as important as the technical skills!
You will not begin writing code for your project until all the planning is done. Ideally your team will be ready to write code by Thursday or Friday of this week.
Today’s topics
- What is agile development?
- Forming final project groups
- Brainstorming product ideas
✅ TODO this morning
- Read this post for an engineer’s perspective on an approach to building software that parallels almost precisely the approach we take in Phase 4: How we use “ship small” to rapidly build new features at GitHub
- 🕛 BY NOON: Make sure you have filled out this survey about your interests and intentions for Phase 4.
- Are you a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet? Read this post and tell us in Slack which one you are.
✅ TODO this afternoon
- Create a Slack channel (not a thread) and add team members and instructors to it.
- Create a team charter with your team and post it in your team’s Slack channel. Please pin or bookmark it. There are resources below to help you with this task.
- Brainstorm ideas for your final project with your team, and be ready to pitch one or two ideas tomorrow morning.
🔖 Resources
Team Charter
- Step-by-step Team Agreement exercise -> Use this if you want a structured, step-by-step process.
If you want something more free-form and creative, consider these:
- A good overview of what a team charter is and how to create one
- Here are three team charter template examples, all from Miro.
Productivity Timers ⏲️
- Cuckoo The one we use in class ⏲️
- Pomofocus Pomodoro Timer
- Marinara Pomodoro Timer Chrome Extension
Time Management
- The Pomodoro Technique for Time Management & Productivity
- Time Blocking
- ⭐ Common Time Management Problems & Solutions The top three might sound familiar:
- Being a perfectionist
- Not Being Able to Concentrate & Maintain Focus
- Scheduling Tasks Ineffectively
Idea Generation 💡
- Short video series on mind mapping techniques
- MindMeister: online Mind Mapping Tool
- MindNode: mind mapping app available in the App store
- Miro: collaborative tool for mindmapping, planning, wireframing
- Whimsical: a little more streamlined than Miro; collaborative tool for mindmapping, planning, wireframing
Inspiration on the technical side 👾
Agile Development
- Beginner’s Guide to Scrum and Agile
- 12 principles from the Agile Manifesto
- The Power in Agile, a talk by Sarah Mei A critical look at the power dynamics implicit in Agile methods.
- Command Line Heroes Podcast Produced by RedHat and hosted by Saron Yitbarek, this is a scripted podcast that tells the story of software from the last 40-ish years or so. Season 1 has an episode of the origin of Agile Development. The whole series is really well done. If you enjoy understanding the history of things like I do, you will like this podcast!
- What is Code? by Paul Ford Read this for the stakeholder perspective – really long but extremely well written and produced!
- Goat User Stories on Twitter