#msf14

In the previous post we said what we'd built, this one is a little bit about how we built it. And actually this one is about the practices rather than the code itself which will be in another post.

First some stats.

Like a lot of teams we worked completely in github, in our case using our teams's github organisation. Our first commit was at 12:59 BST on Saturday, the last at 11:50 GMT today. In between we made another 165 commits which makes for an average of about 7 commits per hour over the hackathon across the three code bases.

I think that makes us sound quite busy.

But it wasn't totally about throwing together any old code. The "XP" part of the team name (PressRedXP) is named after eXreme Programming, a agile-ish sort of approach software development that favours a bunch of behaviours that are meant to produce high quality software made by high quality teams. It's kind of the opposite of what you normally do in a hack and we half-jokingly took the name, but we did do a few of the XP practices.

Most obvious to anyone around was that we had a task board which we used to track what we needed to do.

It started like this...

... and ended like this...

Another key part was that we pair programmed almost all of it. Krishnan and Will hammered out the front end code between them, Roberto and Alex the back end.

Testing is also meant to be a big part of XP. Nah, we didn't test drive it all and we didn't use a CI server as part of our development. But we did unit test the main back end service and we even had a couple of integration tests (using bash scripts and curl!).

XP talks about a sustainable pace and working only 8 hours a day. Ahem. But we did stick to breaks every two hours to pace ourselves.

Not long until we have to down keyboards, but we're pretty much stopping now because actually we've done what we set out to. Or rather, we've done the minimum we wanted to do; if we had another half day we'd be cracking on with the next feature.

Just after noon on Saturday we sat down in the kitchen area with a big piece of paper and some post-it notes and wrote this story title:

I want to meet my friends at a pub

It's a compelling story I'm sure you agree and helping with this everyday social problem is what we've spent our weekend on. A bit more detail (written in gherkin form):

Given I have friends available to meet

When I invite them to meet at a pub

Then it suggests a centrally located pub

We call this creation justmeet, which we think is snappy and just close enough to being litigiously derivative to another site to be interesting.

What does look like in practice? Well it's a bit rough but here's a screenshot journey.

The start screen, where it all begins:

If you are the one who decides to start the meeting, you get to choose who is in:

If instead of creating a meeting you are luckily enough to be invited to one then this is what you get:

Then the magic bit. Once everyone has accepted the meeting the application uses everyone's location to work out the pub that is nearest to the prospective-drinkers central location:

In this case we wanted a better test so we roped in someone who is at home in Leeds. Actually after being up for 30+ hours I don't fancy going to Oldham, but I think it proves it works.

Here's another one where we stuck to the team all sat in MOSI: