This blog post brought to you by: a happy girlfriend. Anna and I went to a UK Basketball game this week and split a Vanilla cone. Rupp Arena ice cream is the best.
Last week, we began our final sprint of the Bootcamp. We have two and a half weeks to work on our final projects before class demo day on Dec. 4th. On Monday, we each began researching and writing our MVP proposals. For mine, I wanted to combine my background in music production, with the LAMP tech stack that we have covered in the Bootcamp.
Our MVP proposal serves to both explain what out project does, and to map out a road map for the development process (including MoSCoW, stories, and wireframes). Taking the time to really plan out our project should hopefully save us a lot of time later on — if there’s one thing I have learned in the Bootcamp, it is the dangers of cowboy coding.
Despite the detailed planning, I still had to remain pretty flexible during this first week of development. I planned on onboarding two frameworks/libraries, Tone.js (for sound) and Pts.js (for visuals). The documentation pages for both of these frameworks/libraries talked about how simple they are to learn, and the example code was often only 10-15 lines long. Because of this, I had a certain time expectation for incorporating in these new techs. Nothing ever goes quite as planned, and it turned out that Pts doesn’t work all that well with React (I had to download an auxiliary package react-pts-canvas). I ended up getting the synth to work more quickly than the visuals, and headed into the weekend with a working synth with basic control parameters.
The first week of our final project sprint had its highs and lows. I really enjoyed the planning process, and was definitely excited to get started! It was rewarding to see aspects of the process come to life, although there were times when things weren't working, and I ended up with less functioning code than I started the day with. Next week we will only have 3 class days to work on the project before breaking for Thanksgiving. I hope to get a lot done by Wednesday, and to then squeeze some work in over the holiday break!