Working With a Team When it Comes to Making an App in a Week
In the last blog post I made about developing a CLI app from scratch, I mostly did it by myself. It took me two weeks to finish it which is twice the time I was supposed to build it if I had a partner. Without a partner, I can do everything my way, but I have to work twice as hard. With a partner, or 3, making an app is way different. I’ve had decent exposure since my last blog post working with about 5 different people on 3 different projects.
The first project was another CLI application. The app spits out and collects songs from artists you like and stores it in a playlist. We used my original CLI app for the base work, and from there it seems like my partner kind of took over. She was doing this, and that, and I was getting lost in her work like, how am I supposed to work when she’s doing all this. Well anyway, I rewrote most of the app and accidentally pushed it up to the master as well as a classic git init, which I did not know at the time erased all former commits, so I expected my partner to be really mad, but she acted surprisingly calm and thankful, even if she was not. Good partner none the less.
The second project was Hackathon, where me and 3 people had to develop a front and back end from scratch and build a decent web app in one day. This project surprised me because I didn’t write a single line of code, but I managed most of the media and some of the styling, putting our project on the top of the pedestal. We actually worked really well together and I had a good time. I just wish I had a chance to actually code in it, which I will in a few weeks.
The third partnership was a little different. It was just me and one other student, and we were building another calendar, only this time with a front end. While my partner did do the initial CSS, he did not really offer much to the application besides style, which I appreciated. My main goal was getting the calendar functions to be in line front to back, but I had a fair amount of trouble. I asked my partner if he wanted to figure out the time piece, and he hacked at it for hours, creating an entirely new front end and back end, that did not necessarily correlate with mine at all. He even made entirely new github repos for his part of the project, forcing me to abandon mine. This was frustrating at first, but in the end it didn’t matter. Hopefully I can rebuild this calendar on my own for Mod3.
When it comes to working with partners, every partner is different. Whether it’s working style, working time, or work in general, everybody handles it differently. I think working with a partner can be hard because it’s basically two different work ethics trying to work together. In my opinion, for optimal success, partners should be assigned with a purpose, because any negatives can be ironed out with positives of the partner. Creating a partnership that is doomed to fail will probably result in failure.
