Bringing out the best in others

At Flatiron school it is a requirement in the first two mods to create a project with a partner. During this time you can clearly see how important it is to have the ability to get along with others. When you have the ability to work with others the possibilities for what you’re working on are now much greater than they would have been if you are unable to get along with the person you’re working with. Even then getting along with someone and having a good time is another difference. Lucky for myself I’m very down to earth and even more lucky than that the people I had the privilege to work with for both of my projects had a great sense of humor which allowed us to flourish as a group. In the mod two project we began working with Javascript and Ruby on Rails to create our webpage app.

My partner Diana and I decided to create a web app of trading cards. At first we thought of doing athletes but we decided it was more feasible with the knowledge we had at the time to go with scientist trading cards. We pair programmed about 90% of our project.This turned out to be great decision, and we were not only able to achieve our MVP (minimum viable product) but many of our stretch goals as well.

The greatest part about pair programming is that you have the ability to use each others strengths and put them toward your project. The even better part of that is that you can help each other grow from your weaknesses and come out a better developer in the end. One of my weaknesses was CSS thankfully my partner Diana was amazing at it, and we managed to not only achieve the functionality we were looking for but we were also able to produce something that is more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Diana also happens to be a designer so she designed our logo at the top left which also happens to be a home button.

The biggest takeaways from the group projects I was apart of were pair programming is amazing and helps both people in the party learn and grow from things they felt they were weak at, it also helps a ton with debugging your code as you go. My other takeaway is that being able to get along with your partners is critical. Even if you don’t see eye to eye you have to be able to look past differences you may have so that you are spending time improving your project as well as your social interaction skills and not arguing and causing more harm than good.

To see the blog Diana and myself co-wrote visit: https://medium.com/@diana.mm/enjoying-who-you-work-with-3ba6f761d262