Project #3: Startup Week

Overview

You’ve already worked in small groups to accomplish various labs and exercises, but this time we’re going to challenge you to work on a whole project with a small team.

Not only will you be asked to exercise additional creativity in designing your own project, your instructors will partner you with other classmates to architect, design, and collaboratively build an application of your own design.

This is meant to push you both technically and collaboratively. It’s a lot harder to work in a team than to work by yourself, but that's most likely what you'll be doing in your first development job after WDI, and it's important to learn how to work together.

Make it work, and make it awesome.

Premise: Startup in a Week

Your team has been put together in order to create a startup around a particular idea. In one week, you're expected to flesh out your ideas as a group and create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Since you'll be answering to investors (the class and your instructors), keep the following in mind:

• What is your application (elevator pitch, ideally in one sentence)
• What value does your application provide to your audience?
• What steps have you taken to entice users? (user experience, a fancy frontend, trying out functionality before being forced to signup)

Technical Requirements

Your app must:

• Use Ruby on Rails and Active Record to build an application
• Create an application using at least 2 related models, one of which should be a user
• Include all major CRUD functions for at least one of those models
• Create your own front-end with HTML, Javascript, & jQuery
• Add authentication to restrict access to appropriate users
• Craft thoughtful user stories together, as a team
• Manage team contributions and collaboration using a standard Git flow on Github
• Layout and style your front-end with clean & well-formatted CSS, with or without a framework.
• Deploy your application online so it's publically accessible

Necessary Deliverables

• A working app, built by the whole team, hosted somewhere on the internet
• A link to your hosted working app in the URL section of your Github repo
• A team git repository hosted on Github, with a link to your hosted project, and frequent commits from every team member dating back to the very beginning of the project.
• A readme.md file with:
  • Explanations of the technologies used
  • A couple paragraphs about the general approach you took
  • Installation instructions for any dependencies
  • Link to your user stories – who are your users, what do they want, and why?
  • Link to your wireframes – sketches of major views / interfaces in your application
  • Descriptions of any unsolved problems or major hurdles your team had to overcome

Suggested Ways to Get Started

• Don’t hesitate to write throwaway code to solve short term problems.
• Read the docs for whatever technologies / frameworks / APIs you use In fact, you should most likely tackle your APIs first.
• Write your code DRY and build your app to be RESTful.
• Be consistent with your code style. You're working in teams, but you're only making one app per team. Make sure it looks like a unified effort.
• Commit early, commit often. Don’t be afraid to break something because you can always go back in time to a previous version.
• Keep user stories small and well-defined, and remember – user stories focus on what a user needs, not what development tasks need accomplishing.
• Write code another developer wouldn't have to ask you about. Do your naming conventions make sense? Would another developer be able to look at your app and understand what everything is?
• Make it all well-formatted. Are you indenting, consistently? Can we find the start and end of every div, curly brace, etc?
• Comment your code. Will someone understand what is going on in each block or function? Even if it's obvious, explaining the what & why means someone else can pick it up and get it.
• Write pseudocode before you write actual code. Thinking through the logic of something helps.

Project Feedback + Evaluation

• Project Workflow: Did you complete the user stories, wireframes, task tracking, and/or ERDs, as specified above? Did you use source control as expected for the phase of the program you’re in (detailed above)?

• Technical Requirements: Did you deliver a project that met all the technical requirements? Given what the class has covered so far, did you build something that was reasonably complex?

• Creativity: Did you added a personal spin or creative element into your project submission? Did you deliver something of value to the end user (not just a login button and an index page)?

• Code Quality: Did you follow code style guidance and best practices covered in class, such as spacing, modularity, and semantic naming? Did you comment your code as your instructors as we have in class?

• Problem Solving: Are you able to defend why you implemented your solution in a certain way? Can you demonstrated that you thought through alternative implementations? (Note that this part of your feedback evaluation will take place during your one-on-one code review with your instructors, after you've completed the project.)

• Total: Your instructors will give you a total score on your project between:

This will serve as a helpful overall gauge of whether you met the project goals, but the more important scores are the individual ones above, which can help you identify where to focus your efforts for the next project!