Today started by being locked out of the building and catching up with the rest of the cohort and seniors while stuck in the stairwell. I met my mentor in person for the first time and found out about which bits of the course are the hardest (week 7 apparently, and week 3 is a big step up from weeks 1 & 2). Eventually the person with keys arrived (should we call them a.. hash..? Sorry, geeky joke. You can’t live and breathe code every day without it infiltrating everything including your humour) and we made our way in to start day 3…

Stand ups were the first order of the day and it turned out that everyone had quite different experiences yesterday. Some pairs completed all of the tasks, and some spent longer delving into different solutions to the first problem, experimenting with different types of solution and refactoring them. I think it’s pretty cool that we’re paired with different people every day and so will naturally have some quite different experiences every day with people who think and act in different ways. There doesn’t seem to be a single way of approaching the problem either. I think everyone found a lot of value in what they did but also appreciated that other pairs’ approaches were completely different and very valuable in a different way.

Today’s challenge was coding part of the Boris Bike system. It started with drawing out some initial domain model diagrams, then following a step by step tutorial to complete rspec setups and commit initial tests. We practiced setting up remotes to our partners’ repos and pull and pushing to the right places.

By the afternoon standup we were all a bit.. disillusioned. A lot of people felt we’d spent a lot of the morning following instructions and wouldn’t feel confident in recreating the work we’d done yet. There were also some worries about the amount of time lunch, meditation sessions and the afternoon standups were taking as everyone was itching to be getting on with writing the code. I think we’re going to organise our time better from now on so that the necessary distractions mentioned are spaced out a bit more allowing us longer periods of ‘proper work’ time in between.

The afternoon was spent completing more of the tutorial. My pair partner Massi and I both had brain melt at about the same time and went for a break which really helped. After that everything made a lot more sense and we finally realised we’d absorbed more than we’d realised of the morning’s work. We were set some quite challenging tasks which threw up a few unexpected bugs but together we managed to spot things, suggest things and make a good job of testing and TDDing the hell out of our little methods. Although it took us until 7:30 to get to the end of the part we wanted to complete, we were on a roll for the last couple of hours and were incredibly happy with the state of our repo when we left!

I think we made a good team today and once again the bits that made it successful were:

  • The combination of two peoples' ideas and experience
  • The strength to let go of your own idea and fully understand the idea someone else is proposing then objectively judge that it is more reasonable than your own
  • The ability of the navigator to be an eagle eyed typo spotter/nitpicker so builds rarely fail due to silly mistakes
  • The willingness of both parties to take a step back, research something together or just allow the other time to re-read and let the information sink in
  • An awareness of your limitations

Really pleased with how today turned out. Thanks to Massi my pair partner! Your ability to do all of this in a language that is not your own is pretty awesome and we definitely accomplished some great things!

Nat x

A nice array of Boris Bikes...