P.U.M.B.

Summary

Me and my team's work on the Compfest 14 Software Engineering Academy Final Project. I was the team leader, leading a team of 4 including me. 2 of the team was assigned to the back-end and the other 2 (one of whom is me) was assigned to the front-end.

Developer Diaries

This is certainly not the highlight of my works. I think I wasn't as technically challenged in this project as some of the previous one primarily because those several previous projects has improved my skills significantly. And I wasn't really proud of how the front-end of this website (the part I was working on with another person) turned out either (more on why later). But what I can say for sure is that just like how the Kantin Kejujuran project enlightened me about the back-end through a painful learning process, this project did the same but for team management & collaborative workflow. The reason why the project is the way it is, is because I wasn't being the best leader and I also didn't apply the best practices for working in a team. These are what I learned :

• For a project with a back-end of complexity X, the corresponding front-end will have a complexity of nX, n > 1. This is to say that a team generally requires more front-end developer than back-end developer.

• Don't branch people's work on git based on the person, but based on feature. This should be obvious but I legit didn't know.

• A good leader should be able to cope and mitigate their team's lack of skills, to a certain extent. Understand the skill level of your team member thoroughly and do not hesitate to be more engaged with them based on that assessment & to assign their task in accordance to that assessment.

• Be really proactive in keeping track of how the team's progresses. Sometimes a member of a team is facing a difficulty but prefer to not bring it up for reasons of vanity. If this occurs, it'd hide setback that are faced, making the team unable to adjust and plan a mitigation early, which would result in the project being delayed.

• As presented above, it's multiple orders of magnitude worse if a setback or issue experienced by a team member isn't discovered early and thus can't be mitigated as soon as possible. So if you're a team member, be honest with the whole team when you face issues that you alone cannot resolve.

I took to heart all of these hard-earned lessons that I learned doing this project in all of the things I do after it.