Broker to Coder? - 9 weeks down

previous article 'Broker to coder? - 7 weeks a'coding'

It’s been a productive few weeks, where we have spent a lot of time expanding on what we have already learnt frontend wise, with a look at the backend and databases.

Week 7, I was feeling pretty comfortable with building a react app from scratch now, during the week we covered how React maintains data (state), how it passes data down through an app (props) and how you can ensure efficiency in a single page application, with only changing components being re-rendered (routing).

Week 8 was all about the back end, building bigger App structures with multiple API requests. The challenge with this is to get the requests in the right place and the rendering (putting things on the page) in the right order. We covered more on React internal APIs, the component lifecycle, firebase deployment (hosting & creating a database), and finally unit testing with Enzyme and Jest.

Client project: HR ticketing system

Sprint 1 - As the scrum lead on this sprint, I was on point to manage prioritisation decisions and design questions, also in close contact with the product owners. The team was then split into pairs, prioritised tickets were assigned and we got to work, aiming to make some easy wins focusing on basic functionality and some UI/design to get some feedback. from the product owner. The Retro huddle at the end of the week turned out to be really useful in improving the ways we were working, especially around breaking complicated tickets down more and merging components into the live app earlier in the week.

Sprint 2 - By the end of this sprint, we had built all the key functional components in the app, including a login page, dashboard with analytics, Navbar, 5 stage sequence for creating a ticket and ticket views. At the end of the sprint, we presented on the live app and received more feedback from the product owner and again used this feedback to prioritise what needed to be worked on for sprint 3 in week 9.

Again, as with most of the course and coding as a whole, lots of perseverance was required for this week. Especially as I was starting to feel a bit ‘coded out’ towards the end of the week. I, therefore, decided to have the weekend off to reset and be refreshed for Monday!

I am still going strong and now my portfolio is coming on too, click here to check it out.