My Chingu Experience

Week 1: Meet the Team, Choose a Project and Decide on the Stack

I was put in a team with people in similar timezones. The team discord channel, github repository, and a google drive was set up for us. Two days had passed and half of my original team did not show up, but Chingu was very helpful and moved me to another team.

We had our first meeting and brainstormed some ideas and we decided by vote, on a project that I had no interest in. But I was happy to participate just to gain some experience.

Week 2: Design

There was nothing much being done this week. We don't have a leader to make the final decision on things like fonts and colours. When asking for opinion, there were usually only 1-2 people respond. So I made a design system with the fonts and colours suggested and agreed on by 2 other members.

We then have people design on different things, where a design system would be quite useful in this case but there were members just using random fonts. We were not working as a team, or maybe some members were not aware of the design system, even though it had been posted in the discord chat a few times.

We also refined the feature list, deciding which features are needed for the MVP (minimum viable product), and what features will be added if we have time after we reach the MVP. I feel we really needed to have a confirmed feature list before we can design the UI effectively.

This week ends with a week 3 sprint meeting. This time we assigned every member a task to complete before next meeting, which I think will work a lot better than last week.

Week 3: More Design, Setup Project Repository, Pipelines, and Coding

This week, I started coding the calendar view, two members will continue working on more designs for other pages and mobile views. This is a very dramatic week, I got into a few arguments with a certain member and one member decided to quit.

Week 4: More Coding (backend and frontend)

This week we made good progress, but also realized we picked an app which is too big to complete in 6 weeks. I spent the week working on signup, login, and logout, and added Context for auth. We also added a bunch of API endpoints, private and public routes, and a signup view.

This is our project at this point of the voyage: github.com/chingu-voyages/v40-bears-team-37..

Week 5: Mobile View, Minor Adjustments

Not much has been done this week. I've taken a break from this project for a few days as I've spent too much time in the previous week to work on some issues with authentication. I worked on some minor tasks such as adding a loading screen and 404 page. I have also started working on the main page mobile view and the sidebar. There were also a few new endpoints added to the backend. There's not much addition to the project from other members as well.

I was happy to learn from the Chingu facilitator that my effort was recognised by another team member this week.

Code at the end of week 5: github.com/chingu-voyages/v40-bears-team-37..

Week 6: Finishing the Project

This week, we added a few new features to finish off the project MVP, the lesson detial modal, search page and "Add Course" Page. I have been working on small tasks and fixes this week, mainly adjusting the sidebar to fit, show and hide in different screen sizes.

Some pages still feel incomplete and there are still a few minor bugs. I think it's quite hard to understand how the app works without showing the user.

Project code at the end of week 6: github.com/chingu-voyages/v40-bears-team-37..

Overall

I've learnt a few things I've never used while working on this project. Session authentication being one, I like the idea of it, but feels like there are too many issues while implementing it, especially with chrome. There were a lot of frustrations working in the team because of the amount of time I've to repeat the same thing because people were not checking discord messages or comments on github. I think I would enjoy the experience a lot more if I had more interests in the project.

I feel we could do a lot better with a project manager or a leader. The group itself was quite unorganized, we did not really have a backlog. There were a few github issues but half of the team weren't checking them even though it was mentioned a few times.

I would also like a designer in our team. We have spent a lot of time working on the design which I think do not look very professional. We also have disagreements on the design and colours. Since we do not have a designer we have one person design one or two pages, so in the end, the pages look like they are from different websites.

The Chingu staff has been super helpful and supportive. We were required to do a weekly check-in, which takes a few mins, the staff would then review it and provide comments and suggestions, and to make sure the team is on track to complete the project. I would definitely recommend it to someone who wants to collaborate with other developers. I have much better experience with Chingu than making my own group or joining other groups via reddit or discord.