Last weekend we had our first Builder’s Weekend at The Starter League. As Arvin made clear, the purpose first and foremost is to learn. Here is the setup, we started at 9am in a large room filled with Starter League Students from all classes: Beginner HTML, Advanced HTML, UX, Visual Design, and Web Development. About 20 or so students pitched ideas that could be created within 9 hours. From here we created development teams which included members from different classes and went to work to create a web app.
Here are my valuable takeaways
- Collaboration: Working with HTML folks was a great experience, not to mention it made our app look less like a programmer’s manifesto and more like a real app. Also this was my first experience utilizing GitHub (a cloud repository for code) with a group of collaborators. Needless to say we worked through our share of merge conflicts.
- Pair Programming: Myself and Mike Dorrance our other group member who is in the Web Development class, were tasked with creating the back-end of our app. This was a great experience in Pair Programming as well as Domain Modeling, sketching out architecture of the app. As would be expected we had some different views on how the app should be setup. After some discussion we settled on our approach.
- Deliverables: Unlike personal projects which can be put on the shelf, we had a clear deadline of 6pm. This meant, like the real world, as time progressed we had to make decisions about what we could or could not produce by the deadline.
This Builder’s Weekend got us primed for the next month of development which leads up to Demo Day where we will debute our newly created apps
My Demo Day Team is looking to create a Web App with the goal to inspire families to do unplugged activities together by recording the adventure, engaging the opinion of all family members and suggesting activities based on age and NEW types of adventures. This is to be user supported and suggested. We are looking to increase the quality time spend amongst families by incentivizing the whole experience.
The Builder’s Weekend was a great experience and I look forward to creating our app for Demo Day.
