Makers Week 8: The Acebook pt 1
Tags: makers, ruby, rails
Published: 2020-01-19 22:25:06

Weekly Goal:

*Can you use high-quality processes to build a project in a team?*

At the start of this week, we were split off into groups to work on another group project. We'll be working together on this project for the next two weeks using Rails which is new to us. We’re making a Facebook clone creatively named Acebook. But we were lucky enough to be given a basic layout with the post feature already set up. It's nice to get to work in a group again and this project will be an interesting one.

You can check out *Acebook* here if you’re interested:
*http://acebook-irrelevant-pests.herokuapp.com/*

Day 1

So on the first day, we had to set everything up like Travis, Rubocop, and deploy the site on Heroku etc. But first, we had to do a stand up to figure out what task everyone would be doing. We decided to split into groups of two and three. My group was given the "*enjoyable*" task of setting up Travis. It was tedious but we got it done although I think I'll have to do it a couple more times to get the hang of it. Finally, at the end of the day, we had a retro to talk about what went well. It was a productive day as we did get Heroku set up and Travis and a couple other things.

Day 2 

The next day I got to get started on some actual coding rather than set up. We started with the update feature which we spent most of the day on. It was difficult to get things going at the start because of all the conventions in rails. But we did learn about RESTful routing before. We ran into quite a lot of bugs but we were able to debug easy enough because Rails doesn’t change debugging. We manage to get that done and scratch the surface of the delete function.


Day 3 

Day three leads us to the delete function or destroy if you’re applying CRUD. This gave us a bit of trouble even though it only one route. We managed to get it done in the end with small tweaks and a bit of debugging. Because we were using Active Record deleting things wasn't much trouble. Active Record has convenient methods for updating and deleting the posts.


Day 4 

I was working on my own on say four mainly because the tasks had boiled down to easier more manageable tasks. We decided that it might be better to get started on the smaller features like adding line breaks or reversing the order of the posts so the newest was at the top. It was fine working on this alone because everyone was only a step away. But the tests were difficult to write since they were all feature tests which seemed excessive. But I managed to get them working so we'll know if those features break.

Day 5 

The last day of the week was quite annoying because when I went for the merge Travis and RSpec failed. I had to spend the morning debugging it. But once I got a look it wasn't too complicated. The main problem was the user authentication was added so you couldn't add posts until you were logged in. After that, we just had some tidying up to do so no real problems.

Summary

I think this week when extremely well we got all our requirements done which was a big win. We worked well as a team and we were able to split up the work quite well. I feel like so far we are well on our way to achieving our weekly goal. So next week is week 2 of Acebook so I'll let you know then if we can maintain our process.