I thought these projects were mostly a disaster. We were each shuffled into 4 different teams with specific responsibilities and dependencies on our classmates, which theoretically would have been a good learning opportunity, but as soon as the project started, about half of the people we were counting on to do their part stopped coming to class for whatever reason. That made it quite difficult to get things done. Additionally, those who remained, at least of those with whom I worked, most of them did not actually seem to pull their weight. I declined to pull their weight for them, although I did offer to help if they were stuck on something. I had to pick up the slack for both of my lead devs, since they were mostly absent. I have never had a good experience with group projects in an academic environment, and sadly this was no exception.
I can't say there was anything enjoyable about this project. Juggling 4 different tasks at once, on top of the other 5 classes I am taking, was simply a pain in the neck.
I cannot ever recommend that this project be done again by anyone, in any way. For a 100 level class that many people, such as myself, are taking only because it is required for a mostly unrelated major, I think it is inevitable that people will stop showing up and teamwork will dissolve. I think the concept of working together and gaining team experience would work well in an higher level class where the students involved are actually there for the express purpose of learning to develop sites and work with teams that do that, but for a 100 level class with people for whom that is not the case, I think, based on my experience and observation with the near absense of teamwork and team members that project is inadvisable. That said, I would not have done anything differently, other than maybe checking in with my junior devs a little better. I did my part, I did my work, and I am satisfied with that.
Unfortunately, I don't think this project successfully simulated working in a real dev environment, unless it is standard practice for the junior devs to do no work and for the lead devs to not show up for work. As I mentioned, I think simulating a real work environment could have a lot more success in a higher level course with people who actually possess the intent to develope websites for a living, but that not being the case here I think explains why people stopped coming to class and contributing to the project. Honestly, on all the projects I worked on, I have no idea what any of my teammates were doing. I only saw evidence of contributed work from Austin, on the Dane Black project, and possibly on the Micah Bradford project (for which I am client). For the most part, on all 4 repos to which I had access, I could not see what 80% of those involved were actually working on.
As client, I provided a detailed site plan for a fictitious deep-sea salvage company. I chose two "salvages" to feature and picked out images to represent them. I wrote text to match the theme and to fill out the content of the site. It was a very good site plan. I also made all of the images availabe for the dev team to access and use.
Communication with the lead dev was done via email. To my knowledge, we had no major issues communicating with each other.
At the time this is written, not every page of the site is complete. The one page that is finished does appear to very closely match the site plan that I provided, so it is satisfactory.
If I were to hire a team to make a site for me again, I would probably hire people who actually build websites for a living. Other than the fact that my devs were not actual web devs, though, there were no hiccups in the process that I feel I would need to account for in the future.
My client siteI was lead dev for the Seth Eyre site project. I assigned everyone on the team, myself included, one page from the site plan to develop. Some communication was done in class, and all assignments were made in writing via email, as well as being recorded in the repository.
Communication with the client was primarily done via text and some via email. Overall, the client was reasonably prompt about providing the information I requested. The last request I made, to enable Github Pages, seems to have gone unresolved, but other than that, things went smooth enough.
I was never granted the admin privileges to publish the client's site myself, but the work that has been done is in his repository for whenever he flips the figurative "on" switch.
I personally considered Github to be of mediocre convenience and usefulness for a team project. It is not as responsive to changes as I would have liked, so checking to make sure new edits to the html and css were rendered correctly was time consuming.
On this project, I developed the "blog" page, minus the header, as Daniel was assigned to make it, so that it would be consistent across the site. Daniel was assigned the home page and to design html and css for the header that would be used across the site. Grant was assigned the "catalog" page. At the time of writing this, neither junior dev has contributed anything to the Github repo. Several times I have offered assistance if it were needed, but I was assured that it was not.
At the time this is written, Github Pages has not been enabled for this site.
link to Github Pages if/when enabled link to repoNo communication was ever had with the lead dev for this project. For most of the duration of the project the team lead was not present in class (and by the time he had returned, I and the other junior dev had moved on without him). (The lead dev also never built the repo structure for Github, as you may have noticed).
Once the other junior dev and I assigned each other tasks, my responsibility for this project did become clear and I was able to complete my part. Prior to that, nothing had been expected of me.
For this site, I wrote the html and css for the "tips" page, including designing the header for the other junior dev to use on the home page. (At the time of writing this, the other junior dev has not added any files for the home page to the repo.)
No outstanding issues were encountered while using Github.
At the time this is written, Github Pages has not been enabled for this site.
link to Github Pages if/when enabled link to repoLittle communication was had with the lead dev for this project, but most of the communication that was had was done via text. Both of the junior devs were mistakenly assigned the same task, which had to be corrected by the junior devs, because the lead dev has absent for most of the project.
Aside from the fact that both of us were assigned the same task without initially realizing it, my assignment was clearly to make the home page, which I did and it looks pretty cool.
I designed the home page for the site, including some elements of the header (other elements of the header were contributed by the other junior dev).
No outstanding issues were encountered while using Github.
Black project site