You’ve already worked in small groups to accomplish various labs and exercises, but this time we’re going to challenge you to work on a whole project with a small team.
Not only will you be asked to exercise additional creativity in designing your own project, your instructors will partner you with other classmates to architect, design, and collaboratively build an API of your own design.
This is meant to push you both technically and collaboratively. It’s a lot harder to work in a team than to work by yourself, but that's most likely you’re going to find yourself doing in your first development job after WDI, and it's important to learn how to work together.
Make it work, and make it awesome.
Your app must:
- build an API and a front-end that consumes it
- Consume your own API by making your front-end with HTML, Javascript, & jQuery
- Craft thoughtful user stories together, as a team
- Manage team contributions and collaboration using a standard Git flow on Github
- Layout and style your front-end with clean & well-formatted CSS
- Deploy your application online so it's publically accessible
- A working API, built by the whole team, hosted somewhere on the internet
- A handmade front-end that consumes your own API, hosted somewhere on the internet
- A link to your hosted working app in the URL section of your Github repo
- A team git repository hosted on Github, with a link to your hosted project, and frequent commits from every team member dating back to the very beginning of the project
- A
readme.mdfile with:- Explanations of the technologies used
- A couple paragraphs about the general approach you took
- Installation instructions for any dependencies
- Link to your user stories – who are your users, what do they want, and why?
- Link to your wireframes – sketches of major views / interfaces in your application
- Descriptions of any unsolved problems or major hurdles your team had to overcome
- Don’t hesitate to write throwaway code to solve short term problems.
- Read the docs for whatever technologies / frameworks / API’s you use.
- Write your code DRY and build your APIs RESTful.
- Be consistent with your code style. You're working in teams, but you're only making one app per team. Make sure it looks like a unified effort.
- Commit early, commit often. Don’t be afraid to break something because you can always go back in time to a previous version.
- Keep user stories small and well-defined, and remember – user stories focus on what a user needs, not what development tasks need accomplishing.
- Write code another developer wouldn't have to ask you about. Do your naming conventions make sense? Would another developer be able to look at your app and understand what everything is?
- Make it all well-formatted. Are you indenting, consistently? Can we find the start and end of every div, curly brace, etc?
- Comment your code. Will someone understand what is going on in each block or function? Even if it's obvious, explaining the what & why means someone else can pick it up and get it.
- Write pseudocode before you write actual code. Thinking through the logic of something helps.
For this project, we want you to work with your team to build a creative product that you actually think someone will want to use. We won't have time to do tons of customer research, but take some time to brainstorm. If you're struggling for ideas, the ones below could help get you started.
Besides finishing WDI, you surely have one or two things you'd love to do with your life. Let's get 'em on paper! You could integrate with a third-party location-based API to allow users to search for a location or venue to add to their bucket list items.
Imagine sending out a survey to everyone in the class – what should we eat for lunch today? Or 1-5, how well did you understand what we just learned? It would be even more awesome if it were realtime, so you could see answers pouring in as they're submitted.
Imagine the benefits of having an API where you could embed comments into any website you want. They could even update in realtime if you wanted, so that you'd never have to refresh the page. CMS providers across the world could quit writing code from scratch and just embed your widget instead.