First Build Week Complete

July 06, 2019

Last Friday marked the end of my first Build Week at Lambda School.

All of the students in my cohort were given a list of project ideas. We submitted our three top choices, and were grouped/paired together by project (first come, first served basis).

I was paired with Ace, another student in the WEB PT7 cohort whom I'd never worked with before.

Our project was to build a responsive multipage marketing website for an imaginary macro calculator app (tracks calories, carbs, fat, protein). We started off with a Zoom meeting, and we got to know each other while discussing the project grading rubric.

Some objectives on the rubric were:

  • Communicated changes to team, performed proper git merges and pull requests to get code to the codebase.
  • Student laid out the design that matches the example well. CSS fundamentals such as: box model, flexbox, and positioning were used appropriately.
  • Phone views look professional at 500px and below and Desktop views look professional at 1000px and above. No horizontal scrollbars exist.
  • Objects were created, Array methods were used, code is readable. No errors in the console when opening the web page.
  • Event Listeners were used, DOM manipulation occurred
  • A reusable component was built. The component should be able to take any number of elements and continue to work well. Example: Accordion with any amount of panels.

The first day was spent setting up our Trello board, setting up our Github repo, and choosing a UI layout and color scheme we wanted to use.

Ace set up the directories, file structures, and initial HTML content. I gathered images we could use and compressed and resized them.

Over the first couple of days, we worked on the homepage together. Ace handled the header, features section, and the footer. I handled the navigation and testimonial carousel.

We ran into some minor git merge issues, but managed to resolve the issues together during our Zoom meetings.

After the Home page, we had the About, Food Prep, and Contact page remaining. We decided that I would work on the About page, Ace would work on the Food Prep page, and we would come together on the Contact page to finish.

Some lessons I learned:

  • It's a good idea to keep some LESS styling un-nested, especially if they're likely to be re-used on other pages
  • Always make sure preprocessor files have been fully compiled before making a pull request
  • Refactoring our codebase along the way may have helped keep our code more DRY - we planned on refactoring everything in the end but never got around to it
  • Regular Zoom meetings and communicating frequently on Slack was crucial in helping us finish our project smoothly and ahead of schedule

You can view the full website here: https://jskway.github.io/bw-macro-calculator/

And the source code: https://github.com/jskway/bw-macro-calculator

Overall, it was a great experience working with Ace and collaborating on this project!

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