Course Project

Project: Getting Started

Before you write any code, make sure that you have a clear shared vision for what you’re building — and make sure your whole team has the same picture of what you are building. It is remarkably easy to start implementing different pieces of software together and not realize it.

Some things that will help you:

  • Talk through it in detail. What will it look like? What will the user of your software see? What will they do? What will they experience?
  • Sketch it out on paper. Make a quick and ugly sketch of what it might look like. Compare sketches. Have somebody not on your team take a look at your sketch, and ask them (without instructing them!) what they expect might happen.
  • Share examples. Are there other similar pieces of software you can use as references, starting points, comparisons?
  • Be ready to throw away your plan. Once you get started, you may discover that your original vision didn’t make sense. That’s OK! The purpose of planning this project is to start our in a direction that makes sense — not to predict your destination.

Do the planning above first. When you are ready to create a GitHub repository for your project, use the GitHub Classroom assignment.

Make sure your whole team has cloned the repository and can run it. If any team member is not able to pull or push changes to the project, that is a whole-team emergency. Make sure all of your team members are able to work at all times!

To help communicate about your project, please *consider* doing the following:

  1. Create a new public channel in the Dev Garden Slack for your project. (Note: a “public” channel is still private to Macalester, and does not show up for everyone automatically. “Public” just means that you can have preceptors and other students jump into your channel when you want to chat with them, without you having to authorize them first.)
  2. Invite all your teammates.
  3. Invite your instructor.

Next: Advice as you work