It starts

Being a fledgling web developer, we are on the verge of being “kicked out of the nest” to see if we can fly. It’s scary, but necessary. One part of the multitudes of things we’ve been given to prepare for this is our final project: Scale-Up. It’s an interesting catch-all name that encompasses a lot of different experiences for students depending on their preferences and choice. For me, that means jumping in to an existing project that’s been around for a while at Turing.

The Looking-For app exists to allow Turing graduates (and those soon-to-be) to easily search high-potential job postings in a more efficient manner. I did not know that when I started. That became the first (minor) thing of many that I had to learn and get up to speed on as I landed in the project running.

It continues

I wouldn’t say that I did a very good job of really understanding the project before we started. It wasn’t until I was given the task of creating a new endpoint that I finally had the mental framework in place to understand what was going on. And it’s not even that big of an app.

Aside from features and the code that makes them possible, there were a number of existing issues left behind by past cohorts and instructors. Looking through those gave a great idea of where the project stood when the previous students were done with it and where we could take it.

At the beginning, as we were getting acquainted with the app, we just grabbed some issues off github and took care of them which feels really good and productive. As we got further along and our relationship grew more intimate, we started noticing additional ways it could grow, allowing us to create our own new issues (and close some of them).

It ends

After flailing around in this project for a while, I would say that it gave me valuable experience in joining an existing project (hey, that’s the name of the show). The biggest thing I think I’ve learned is that it can be difficult to try to comprehend a project from scratch. For me, getting my hands dirty with a task is the best way to really understand what’s going on.