Being beginners how we managed to build a dynamic frontend clone of a website in 4 days

Being beginners how we managed to build a dynamic frontend clone of a website in 4 days

Hi reader, In this blog, I would like to share my experience, as a team of three budding web developers how we pulled off building the dynamic frontend clone of a site in a remote working environment.

Let me introduce myself, Currently, I am a trainee at Masai School, a military-style coding boot camp doing my full-stack web development program, and completed two months of training as of now. As a part of our curriculum, we have a build week every month in which all students will be divided into three-member groups and given a problem.

remote-team-square.png

We were team lithium, consisting of three members Rakesh, Gayathry, and myself. We were given a problem statement to clone the dynamic frontend part of toggl website. Toggl is a time tracking app that allows users to keep a track of their activity and gives a detailed insight to optimize their workflow.

This blog is segmented into two parts,

  • Plans and Implementation

  • Challenges and key learnings

Plans and Implementation

Day 1 - After having a brief intro of ourselves we started with analyzing all the pages of the site. We sorted them based on the doability. After that, we planned to divide our work into two parts, the static part, and the dynamic part. We decide to make all the static pages first and later add functionalities. Finally, we kick-started the work.

Day 2 - As we had more emphasis on responsiveness and all the minute details, the styling part consumed time like anything and we seemed to be lagging behind compared to other groups. But we were going as per the plan.

Day 3 - As the most time-consuming styling part was already in place, we started merging the individual works together. Then we started adding functionalities to static pages which were quite easy compared to the styling part. So we realized a rapid boost in our progress.

Day 4 - It was the start of the new year 2021. Officially it was a day off but we were too busy working on our project. We unexpectedly had a major setback in the progress but we figured it out and reverted back to track. And Yes! finally, we sailed through the hurdles and reached our destination.

Challenges and key learnings

Brainstorming - As I mentioned we had a major setback in the final phase of our project, it took more than half the day to bounce back. Finding the root cause for the setback, it was because of our less importance to brainstorming. Thinking of saving some time skipping it and directly jumping into work but that act costed us more than half the day.

Naming convention - We were guided to use a standard naming convention but at some places, we took it lite and neglected the use of standard convention. Because of which we had to recheck some codes for the places which caused unexpected behavior.

Interdependency of data across pages - Major problem we faced was this, the functionality of one page was dependent on the data of another page. This made parallel working difficult and significantly reduced our efficiency. This taught us what real collaborative working is all about and the importance of organizing tasks across teammates.

The best part of this project is that teammates were randomly assigned, initially we didn't know each other but we got acquainted during this project. I was fortunate to have skilled and highly motivated persons as my teammates, we had an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Besides everything, we enjoyed working together. We are grateful to Masai school for giving us the exposure to work on team projects.

I wish to conclude this blog with a quote,

“Success is normally found in a pile of mistakes”

I started searching for it. Hope you are also searching.😃

Thank You.