Agile Development 101
Before this Bootcamp, I had never even heard of Agile Methodology. While working in education, I learned much terminology and fancy acronyms and all kinds of learning theories and methods. Agile is less about learning, but more about the practical. I love Agile Development because it breaks everything down into small, manageable pieces. It is easy to get overwhelmed with problems at work when you have a huge workload. Agile Methodology ensures you have a process to manage your project well, and ensure it is completed on time and functional.
Here's the basic structure of Agile Methodology. A project is broken down into weekly sprints. Let's say you have a fullstack app you are building in two weeks (terrifying, yes). You would break it down into Sprint 1 and Sprint 2. In Sprint 1, you have daily stand-up to review your previous work in the past 24 hours, look ahead to what you hope to accomplish in the next 24, and any blockers (things you need help with right now), challenges (things you are struggling with and might need help with) and any Aha moments (things you learned that gave you that light bulb feeling). This stand-up time is when you ask for help and seek feedback to get the actual coding done. At the end of the sprint, you take some time to reflect in a retro. The retro is where you reflect on what you accomplished, your code, your work ethic, etc. It is important to reflect on your work weekly because it helps you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, which ultimately helps you identify in what ways you need to grow as a programmer. Retro is a great time to think through your own growth, but also how to practically improve weekly.
For the Frameworks
I have heard that there are developers who don't like frameworks or libraries. They want vanilla JavaScript, not React or Angular. They want Python, not DRF. CSS, not Bootstrap. While I understand the sentiment (frameworks are another complicated system to learn), it’s just not practical. Frameworks and libraries make life SO MUCH EASIER. React and its JSX take hundreds of lines of HTML and JavaScript into manageable, easy to write and read code, into much smaller chunks. Is the setup lengthy? Sure. Can it cause major issues (hello Bootstrap) when integrated incorrectly? Absolutely. Still, the benefits outweigh the hurdles. Bootstrap eliminates so much CSS code due to its responsive nature. No more @media! Django takes Python and SQL together to form a beautiful database, without the hundreds of SQL queries you could create. While you can do all of these things without frameworks or libraries, they truly do make it easier. It takes time to learn, but it ultimately saves time once you have the working knowledge you need. Finally, want a job? Most jobs want you to utilize frameworks and libraries. React, Angular, Django, and many more are needed in our current job market. You have to have at least a beginner's knowledge of these systems in order to work in this career. Don’t ignore these systems-we need them!
