Week 04a - 10.22 Tue -

Updates to Starter Code

There were a few updates to the starter code, as reflected in these PRs

Note that if you are far enough along that you used the UCSBDates controller as a basis for your code, you may want to look at PR89 above, and make a similar change in your code.

I’ve already pushed these PRs into each of your team repos, but that means you’ll need to rebase your branches on the main branch to pull in these changes.

This link explains how to do it:

Please do this with the branches you are working on frequently so that you pull in changes to the starter code, as well as your fellow team members work.

Start with Standup (aka “Daily Scrum”)

  1. First, please take a moment to make a standup post on your official slack team channel The post can just be something like this:

    image image

    The three questions are:

    • What have you finished since last standup?
    • What are you working on now?
    • Are you stuck on anything, or blocked by anything?

  2. When you see that everyone that is present has made a post in the channel (including anyone attending remotely via zoom), invite everyone to stand, and read out their post to the group.

    (Yes, I know this may seem silly. However, the point is to actually practice standups the way that professional software development teams do them, rather than just talk about them, or read about them. Trust me, this will pay off when you are at your first job/internship where they do this, because you’ll know what’s going on.

    Plus: right now, while the project is relatively straightforward, the value of this may not be as clear, but as the projects get more complex, trust me, the value will reveal itself.)

  3. For anyone that’s missing, please check on the slack, and let them know that they missed standup, but that they are encouraged to post a standup update as soon as possible.

Then, update your team Kanban board:

More about standup meetings:

Update Team Kanban board

We’ll add a second important “Agile Ceremony” after the Standup meeting: reviewing the Kanban board.

  1. As a separate short meeting after standup, while everyone is still paying attention, bring up the Kanban board on the big shared team monitor. (Share the screen for anyone on zoom).

  2. Look first at the “In Review” column. For each PR that needs a review assign someone to do the review. You are strongly encouraged to prioritize the code reviews, because later in the course, getting PR’s code reviewed and merged is the only way your team earns points.

    So, when the meeting is done, do the code reviews first, before you jump into your own work for the day.

  3. Now look at the In Progress column. There should typically be precisely six cards in the In Progress column; one per team members. If that’s not the case, then check in with the team members that don’t have a card in the column.

    In addition, be sure that cards in the In Progress, In Review and Done column are assigned to a team member. The video linked below shows how to do this.

Kanban board Video

Here’s a short video (5 minutes, 42 seconds) that goes along with team01; I recommend you watch it sometime Sunday or Monday. It has something easy you can do to help organize your work for team01.

I suggest you try to complete at least one issue per day starting today; it will be much easier to finish the project by the deadlilne if you do that!

More on Code Reviews

Note that if you have a PR that needs a code review, that’s a form of a blocker, so you are encouraged to mention it during standup. It’s not blocking you from doing more work on other issues, but it is blocking you from being done because the work isn’t done until it’s merged into the main branch.

Note: please don’t merge your own branches into main; someone else on the team should do it after they perform an approving code review.

For more information on how to do code reviews, see:

A little bit each day! Slack Post, Friday 10/18, 10:57am

A general bit of advice:

This is a course where doing “a little bit each day” works a lot better than planning a last minute push the day before something is due.

The reason is that you tend to run into problems that require checking in with folks, so doing 30 minutes per day for 5 days (2.5 hours total) is a lot more effective than doing 5 hours on the last day (twice as much time); you just get more done, because in between you can check in with folks to ask for help on things you are stuck on.

So let me encourage you: set a 30 minute timer, and try to do at least 30 minutes of work on team01 each day between now and this coming Tuesday.

If/when you run into problems, post to your team channel first (since everyone on your team is doing pretty much the “same but different, but also sort of the same” assignment.)

If they don’t know then try #help-team01.