IT'S A MAKERTHON, NOT A SPRINT.

Hello readers, it's been a while since my last confession, err I mean post. Everything has been ridiculously hectic lately. I can't believe I am saying this, but we are less than a month away from graduating! What a journey and a privilege it has been so far.

The last two weeks we have been busy covering topics from Ruby on Rails and AngularJS to testing with Karma and Protractor. This week is Makerthon. The general idea is that we are given the time between today (Monday) and Wednesday morning to work with our group and make some kind of program. We are allowed to do anything we want, but must keep in mind that we have very little time, so the idea must be simple. Unlike typical hackathons, there is no tangible "prize" involved, but the real objectives are centered around getting as much from this learning experience as we possibly can. We still have to write tests, and allow those tests to drive our program design. We still have to utilize DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and MVP (Minimum Viable Product) principles. And we still have to refactor whenever possible. Working in a group can be very difficult, but when done correctly, it can yield results that are far beyond what any individual can produce in the same time frame.

Our group has decided to split into subgroups: frontend and backend. I think this will be particularly helpful because this is quite true to real life. We created a new git repository within which we initialized a rails application. From there we updated our README file to include the most basic functionality we wish to incorporate (which are essentially our user stories) and made sure our gemfile included all the gems we were sure we needed plus a few extra that will likely be needed later down the road. The changes were then pushed to Github so that the frontend and the backend groups will each have access to the same starting point. Each group can then split off into different branches to work on their designated tasks until they decide to regroup and merge if the code on both sides is deemed acceptable.

I anticipate lots of challenges, but I'm excited to do something with my group that is truly our own.

Let's see what we can come up with in two days. Go go go!!!