This is an update to my previous post from /r/ProgrammingBuddies five months ago.
Five months ago I found my skills starting to stagnate partly because I wasn’t motivated anymore to learn and partly because I found myself building the same type of web applications. The Weather App, To Do App, Reddit Clone, Twitter Clone, Blog CMS etc…I made the decision that I was going to try to build something out of my realm and what better way to create something then to create it with others.
I knew there had to be a subreddit where there was a community of people who wanted to continue to improve their development skills together with others. Then I found r/ProgrammingBuddies and I reached out to all of you. My goal was to work with motivated people who wanted to continue to learn and develop their skills while building something awesome. It wasn’t about building the next great web app it was all about the learning experience.
In the beginning our Slack team had around 20 members total. It was pretty amazing to get this amount of interest. If this group was going to succeed it was important to have a plan just like any project.
We decided that 20 people working on a single project just wouldn’t work out. So we decided to split up the members into groups of 4-5 with each group working on their own project. That way the teams were smaller and easier to manage and also ensures each member can have a bigger impact within their respective team.
There was a lot of excitement and anticipation in our Slack team in the first month. Teams were choosing their tech stacks, figuring out designs, member’s roles etc...But as time went on, naturally the numbers started to dwindle. People were getting busy, some wanted to jump straight into code and others just simply disappeared. It was bound to happen.
Although we were split up into individual groups, we still tried to support each other if needed since this was supposed to be a learning experience for everybody. But even with the added support from other groups, some members were still MIA but that wasn’t going to deter me and luckily other members from continuing on with their goals.
Fast forward six months later, we are now ready to launch our first version of our project, Mentrship!. Mentrships is a platform where students can receive mentorship from experienced professionals in their field of interest and professionals can mentor aspiring learners. We already have a few software engineers and developers ready to mentor people.
Mentrship Features
User sign up and registration.
Mentor sign up and registration via LinkedIn.
Ability for users to search and filter mentors depending on category.
Ability for users to choose the right mentor by viewing the mentor’s profile skills, bio and reviews.
Ability for the mentor to decide whether to accept or decline a user mentorship request by viewing the user’s profile skills, bio and reviews.
Communicate through our chat platform.
Leave a review once the mentorship has ended.
It took a lot of long nights, sprint planning sessions and code reviews but with hard work, perseverance, motivation, inspiration and determination anything can be accomplished. If you would like to read more about our project, you can check out our github repo
One thing I did mention in my original post is that I’ve attempted to work in a collaborative project with members (from reddit) in the past and it has always failed within the first 1-2 weeks. Here’s a few things I learned from this experience and how we made it work.
Motivated Team Members. This was integral to the team’s success. Every team member was actively engaged in our slack group, participated in our sprint planning sessions, provided support and mentorship to other members. All this combined kept the project rolling all the way up until our launch date. Having a strong leader in your group is also crucial to a team’s success.
Create short term goals. It is very easy to assign tasks to team members and leave it up to them to complete it without a deadline. Our team followed the Scrum methodology by performing 1 week sprints (usually 2 weeks). By doing this we were able to ensure ourselves that each week the project would be continuously progressing.
Planning is everything. One of the main reasons why our project succeeded I believe was because how we planned everything from day one. Everything from UI/UX design, flow of the app, routing, api design was all carefully planned. Our group used various project management tools such as Waffle, google hangouts, MindMup and Slack to keep track of our progress.
Project Structure was probably one of the most important thing I’ve learned throughout this entire experience and is a very underrated skill. When I work on personal projects, my files is usually scattered all over the place. Luckily for me I had members on my team who already had experience working on large projects and knew how to maintain a clean project structure. Now I have a sense of comfort that I won’t be 100% completely lost when working on other large code bases and I’ll also have a better idea on how to organize my own personal projects.
If all this sounds interesting and exciting to you then drop a message in the comments and join our Slack group Project Unicorn. We’re ready to start a new round of projects. The requirements from my original post still apply.
you are NOT a quitter. This means you are determined to start a project and finish it
you are NOT an a**hole, jerk
How we can all benefit
learn new skills and continue to level up existing skills
learn how to use GIT properly
getting stuck on a problem sucks so lets work together and help each other
build up your portfolio
by the time your project is complete, your life will be 100x more awesome
Thanks for reading and we hope to see you in the Project Unicorn Slack Group
Update: Slack invite link has been removed.