Project Polish

Learning Goals

Students will be able to…

explain what considerations go into a polished project
do an audit of a current project on their resume and improve at least one area of that project

Warm Up

What projects are listed on your resume?
How sure are you that they are as good as they could be?
If they are as good as they could be, how do you know? What have you done to get them there?
If they aren’t as good as they could be, why not? (not sure what to do, haven’t made the time, etc.)

What should I care about?

You are human, you are not perfect. That’s why we have teams; to help each other out with blind spots. You have a lot going on and it can be hard to focus on getting the little things done.

Many projects are littered with issues! The exercise of building software is never-ending. Today we are going to discuss some specific things you should consider as you polish projects, specifically for your resume.

Error Handling

Human readable errors are important!
This includes error handling on the frontend and on the backend
Focus on the user experience

Validations

Client side: Let this be your first guard against the user doing something they aren’t supposed to do.
Server side: Let this be your last line of defense if client side validations fail for some reason.

Making sure UX is simple and useful
Making sure that you can go back after you reached a particular page
If you don’t know much about UX, you should read this book: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve King

Understanding Basic Style

Understanding a decent amount of CSS (or SASS): https://learn.shayhowe.com/
Picking better color palettes: https://flatuicolors.com/
Picking great typography: https://fonts.google.com/
Making it accessible to users: https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/accessibility.html

Edge Cases

If user does X, what happens to your application? Are there any unwanted consequences?

You’ll surely discover new edge cases along the way. It’ll make you wonder how a user even did a certain action in the first place. Mapping out edge cases will save you a lot of headaches in the future. It will also make you look thoughtful and thorough, which people who consider paying you a lot of money to write code will like.

No passing tests === no deploys

While you should have a decent amount of test coverage, your spec must be passing before it gets deployed.
If you see that your tests are not passing while being ran in continuous integration tool, then the deploy should be stopped.

Moral of the story: Use CI.

Test the most crucial front-end features

You should be making sure that your most crucial features are being tested, even on the front-end.
Many times, you’ll hear that it works on my machine but then it doesn’t in other environments.
Testing foundational interactions that your user will encounter is essential to building great software.

Documentation/README

I’d like to know a few things:

What does your project do?
What does it look like? (screenshots)
How can I get set up and start contributing?
Is there any strange configuration that I need to know about?
Is this project dependent on another project?

Git Commit messages

Sometimes projects can get a little crazy and we commit code with messages that are incoherent. We can fix this by doing a few things:

Abiding by a git commit message template
Sqashing old commits into something more readable
Be professional. Don’t be like these people: http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com

Project Audit

Take 5 minutes to select one of the projects listed on your resume that you would like to polish. Copy and paste the repo link and your resume into the cohort channel.
Take 30 minutes to go into your partner’s repo. Do an audit and give them feedback on each category
Take 3 minutes to read through the feedback, 3 minutes to clarify anything with your partner.
Decide what you are going to prioritize polishing today. You can absolutely continue on this throughout the coming weeks, and this would be a great thing to talk with your coach about! But for today, pick a bite-sized chunk that you think will take 45 minutes - 1 hour.

Work Time

Take the next ~1 hour to start working on one bite-sized piece of polishing based on your partners feedback!

Wrap Up

DM your career coach and instructors letting us know…

The feedback I got
The area I focused on
The steps I took, the outcome (show your group!)
The steps I plan to take in the future (and where they are documented)

Audit Rubric

Git Workflow

Are the commits following a consistent pattern?
How were branches utilized?
Was a PR template used?
If a pair/group project, are code reviews/conversations present?

Testing

Are you able to clone down the app and run tests?
If so, do all tests pass?
Is there documentation on how to show coverage?
If so, is coverage > 99%?

Deployed Application

Do you know how to use the application?
Is navigation clear and easy?
Try to poke holes in the app - Did you get any errors? Should you have gotten any errors?
Run an accessibility audit (in DevTools, either use the aXe tool or under the Audits tab). Any issues with accessibility?
Were you confused about what the app did, how to use it, or anything, at any time? Please be as specific as possible, and provide solutions if you have any!

Documentation / Resume

Does the resume highlight things that set this developer apart from other applicants for a Junior Developer position?
Is wording in resume and README consistent?
README (lower priority for today - we will have a more in-depth workshop on READMEs later in the mod!)
- Is there an explanation of the purpose of the app/problem it is solving?
- Are there screenshots?
- Are there crystal-clear instructions on how to get the project up and running on your machine?
- Is there detailed info on endpoints (verb, human readable explanation of the data, endpoint, response (body and codes), expected request if applicable, errors that will come back and why)?
- Is this dependent on any other project? Is that project linked?

Feedback Synthesis (to be completed by author of project)

What are 2-3 main takeaways from this feedback?
What feels most urgent to you?
What feels highest leverage?
What are you going to start on today (~45 minutes of work time)?
What other pieces would you like to continue polishing?