This is the section of the course that the previous 11 weeks of work have led up to, and it's felt great to get started! The format of this week and the coming weeks may be a bit different than the previous weeks, as we started our final project phase!

If you've enjoyed this blog post, maybe consider checking out my GitHub 😁

What's happened this week

Version control in teams

We started the week off by getting together in our newly assigned teams, to have a play around with version control in a team as opposed to in the usual pairing set-up. This was good to have a small play around with before we got stuck into the project, so we can hopefully minimise the issues once we start on our more valuable code!

Idea generation and pitching

Each of the team members came up with ideas for an app, and then posed these to the rest of the team. We then decided on the best three and fleshed out these ideas with what we the MVP's for the app would be, and tech ideas, plus user stories.

We presented these ideas to the Northcoders tutors for feedback on ideas, and luckily they liked each of our ideas, so we ended up deciding on the one that appealed to all of the most during our ideation stage.

Our project

Our idea is a behaviour tracking app that helps solidify the positive behaviour by having the users be in teams to hold them accountable to each other for the progress towards their goals.

I'm really excited to work on this app, and especially with my team, because they're like minded people and we've had a great start to our project where we're in agreement about almost all things. And we're all interested in branching out into new bits of tech, and getting more experience, no matter how brief, into new tech that could shape what kind of dev work we want to do.

We've had a lot of challenges at the back half of this week when testing new bits of tech and finding our feet with it, but I'd much rather find these issues now, rather than set out starting out starting making the app, and then find were we went wrong.

New tech I've started learning

Svelte

One of the first bits of tech we decided to look into was Svelte, the main decision behind this was because we'd heard a great deal of praise for it, and wanted to try our hand at picking up something a new piece of tech that was outside what we've been taught in the course.

So far, I'm really enjoying the way Svelte is written, it looks a lot friendlier and is much more approachable at a glance and I'm really enjoying that the CSS is scoped by default to each component.

TypeScript

TypeScript was a pretty obvious choice to extend our tech stack with, as a superset of JS it allows certain quality of life improvements that come in handy when working in teams, and not having to worry about type coercion.

I followed a TS video to sketch out some basics in a repo, and I'm looking to get a little more hands on with it in the next few days but so far I'm really enjoying playing around with a statically typed language.

NativeScript

We started looking at NativeScript as we are thinking about going down the route of Svelte Native and as that's built using NativeScript, we thought I'd be a good idea to get a bit of familiarity with this.

After a few false starts with NativeScript, and us nearly having to give up on using it, we found the NativeScript Playground tutorial to actually be one of the best ways to get stuck in with NativeScript.

Resources I've found useful this week

Svelte Blog

This Svelte blog post was a really good start into following a tutorial and how to get going with Svelte.

HalfNelson's Github

HalfNelson's Github repos have been a really valuable resource to be able to see some examples of how to use Svelte and there's some great starter repos to use to get to grips with Svelte and SvelteNative.

CodeSTACKr Typescript Crash course

I followed this TS video to learn about some of the basics of TypeScript, what I've seen so far it's been really clear and easy to follow so I can get up to speed with TypeScript as fast as possible.

NativeScript Playground and Docs

As mentioned before the NativeScript Playground has been great to get to grips with so far. Their docs have also been a great resource too.