Week 03b - 10.16 Wed -

Slack Post, 10:35am

For discussion, today, Wednesday 10/16:

Today will be just a “work day” on jpa03 after all. Students are still encouraged to come in person if at all possible, but may use zoom if they really need to. (See slack post for Zoom links).

Please do come to lecture tomorrow (Thursday 10/17) if at all possible, because we are planning team activities that are best done in person.

Please note that the “Chromatic” stuff is new for F24, and that we are still figuring out how best to incorporate it into our workflow and into the course. So there may be some “turbulence” as we figure that out. Some of the issues don’t show up until you try a product “at scale”.

Chromatic offers two services:

  1. Hosting for the Storybook pages, which if I’m not mistaken is free and unlimited for open source projects
  2. Visual “Snapshots” of builds that are compared for any changes; here, the free tier has a 5000 snapshot per month limit which we have already exceeded.

My hope is that exceeding the limit does not affect the Storybook building/hosting but it might affect the “build” page. So *we will not be checking the build page as part of the assessment of jpa03, only the Storybook page. If the storybook page is not building properly, please pull from the starter code again. (Note that some students may run into git merge/rebase issues; I’ll address those separately in a moment.) If that still doesn’t fix it, move on to the other parts of the lab.

I’ve makde a separate #help-storybook-chromatic channel on the Slack so that we don’t clutter up the main #help-jpa03 channel with storybook issues. Remember to use #help-lecture-discussion though for all issues (except the storybook/chromatic issues) during your actual lecture and discussion sessions. Use #help-jpa03 for help at all other times of day.

Slack Post, 1:14pm

IMPORTANT: Please DO NOT set up your own communication channels as an “alternative” to using the course slack (iMessage, Discord, etc.). When you do that, you cut the staff out of the loop. We are an important part of your team.

I realize that you may have a thousand reasons for preferring iMessage/Discord/WeChat, etc. over Slack, and you may be used to doing this in other courses. But in this course, we are trying to replicate a professional software development organization.

Learning to communicate like a professional with your colleagues is an important learning goal of the course. We cannot do that if/when we are scattered across multiple communication channels.

You may use the Audio/Video features of Discord if you like to supplement the text communication over Slack. But please do NOT use these other tools as a substitute for communication over the Slack.

And please make sure that you are monitoring the slack on a daily basis for important updates from your team and the staff.