In these articles, I am going to share my personal experience of building a clone of a dating app. Despite not having any coding background we were able to complete this in the given time frame all thanks to Masai school. I am also going to share how we came across various hurdles and manage to overcome them. how we as a team co-ordinated with each other and communicated various problem and difficulty. Stay till the end if you want to know more.
Background
I have completed one month in Masai school it was an amazing and exciting journey till now, with the daily assignment problems and skillathon we have come a long way from nope to someone who knows at least some basic stuff about android development. At the end of the month, we have to build a week where we need to showcase skills and work on building some real-life projects. Over task was to clone the Trulymadly app.
How the journey started.
So on the first day, we were introduced to the team. Which consisted of three-member in total. we started by making a plan of what are the resources required and from where we will get them. Based on over knowledge we distributed our work. We were constantly communicating via slack and WhatsApp and if the problem was big them we even connected via zoom, based on how big was the problem. Because unnecessary zoom call reduced the productivity of the entire team so we allowed those people who were really aware of the problem. Since we weren’t taught most of the functionality part, we decided to make screens that look similar since we’ve had extensive assignments on layouts. After making initial screens, we had the biggest river to cross, i.e is to push over code to GitHub. We had some idea about that but we don’t have any experience. The main issue was with merge conflicts. So we lost most of the time of day one. we. But by the next day afternoon, we got the hang of it and we started making the different screens.
The Middle
After almost millions of iteration, we were able to get a horizontal scroll view that was similar to the original app. The individual work that was happening was very less since we were getting the hang of how to work as a team as each of us needed another one’s help for the app to come out as planned. We made profile screens for both the female and male. You’d get female profiles if you have selected a male radio button and visa versa. But most of our time was spent solving each other’s issues and since most of what we were learned was on layouts, we gave more time for similar-looking screens rather than functionality. Some of the major challenges which we face throughout the journey-
- Thanks to covid-19 we all were working remotely and that was the biggest huddle to communicate over ideas with the teams.
- As we all were connected through technology one of the major problem was frequent power cuts and low bandwidth internet because both of my project partners were from remote places in India. 3.Because of this, there was always a communication gap between team members, this leads to loss of productivity and confusion but how every working day and night skipping new year party we manage to resolved all this problem.
- As we didn’t know each other personally, they were not comfortable initially but then I started to identify common ground to make them comfortable but asking some personal questions also sharing some funny jokes.
- The language was also some concern they were not able to articulately there taught.
- There was some clash within the team because of differences in opinion and view.
- I think working alone is much easier because u are the only captain of your project but it is not possible in this day and age.
But despite all this challenge and difficulty, we manage to complete the project in 3 days with sleepless night and some time even without food, it was all because in back of the mind we all had a hunger to prove over self and win a cash prize of five thousand bucks.
Learning
One of the major learning was to work as a team remotely because for us it was a first-time experience.
We all have enhanced knowledge by sharing various concepts with each other.
We also learn to handle various git related to the conflict.
Implement the concepts that we have to learn and elevate over thinking beyond that to come out with a unique solution. In terms of design and features.
We also learn to manage time and the way to handle the pressure.
how to handle that this kind of competition give and real-life feeling of building product which are out there in the market, and can give some edge over others.
The End
We stopped working on it, the night before the presentation and started practicing for the presentation because we knew that if we couldn’t present what we did in an effective way, all the hard work will go into the drain. So although we had time to better some things, we used that time for 4 dry runs of the presentation and we got the timing right i.e., under 5 minutes. We gave a decent presentation. I knew how good other apps were looking and wasn’t expecting to cut it to the top 6 but Nrupul’s message that we’d missed it by a small margin really made me happy. It was a kind of reminder that our hard work didn’t go in vain and was recognized. Overall it was a great journey working in a team and got hang of how a project is delivered from one end to the other.