Working with a Team: Web Design

Over the past weekend, my team and I developed a coding homepage website. The site was meant to help coders by keeping their important links and notes and things in one convenient location. Sounds simple right?

oh no…

So the first thing we did as a team was brainstorm ideas for a website. And let me tell you, this was by far the hardest part of the assignment. When things are laid out in front of me, I am a ravenous beast hungry for more! I can eat and eat until there’s a steaming pile of code in front of me that accomplishes an arbitrary task. But wait, we have to design this website ourselves? With no guidance? I was drawing a blank. Thank god my teammates had my back and could think rationally about a problem they had and how to address it. Phew! off the hook.

Now we just have to do our coding and then it’ll be done, right? Well… it didn’t quite turn out that simply. Apparently when three people are working separately on the same thing on different computers and we’re all editing the same files, things can get a little messy. Thankfully there’s GitHub, which definitely provides a great structure to ensure everyone’s work can be done independently but assembled easily. Once again, however, things are never as simple as they seem, especially in the world of coding.

“I just pushed, can someone merge?”

“Oh whoops, forgot a semicolon, can someone merge?”

“Oh that isn’t working as I thought it would when deployed, I need to merge again…”

Finally, after much finagling, we figured out all the GitHub nitpicky stuff. We were finally ready to really bear down on the work that we’ve all been itching to do. We were really getting ready to knock this thing out, just get it over with. But….

No I’m just kidding. At this point we really did just knock out the code, and it turned out to be the easiest part. I guess our planning and brainstorming paid off in the end 😛