Week Seven ➙ Iron Yard Reflective Journal

reflections on rotating team leadership

In general, I’m pretty comfortable as either a leader or a follower. I’ve never been an administrator or high-level manager, though teaching certainly involved a lot of oversight and facilitation sorts of leadership roles, as well as helping others with tasks I was not directly working on myself simultaneously — and I have at least run departments or committees before. Moreover, the Iron Yard has definitely made me a better planner and enforced a discipline in certain aspects of planning (and particular sorts of thinking behind it) that I’d never previously considered.

Not being able to write code as a team lead was frustrating, but helping and working collaboratively with team members was rewarding and productive. I wish we had spent more time working in person over the weekend — or found better ways to work together remotely, since I think that would’ve ultimately helped us make more progress than we did.

I learned that naming-conventions are important and can be frustrating if not shared or agreed-upon in advance. I learned that even the slightest of duplications in minor merge-conflicts can be annoying hindrances if not resolved carefully and properly. I also saw in action different opinions regarding semantic HTML to an extent that made me realize that there are certainly some “wrong” answers — and for sound reasons — but many times there may be no one “right” answer. Conventions are great, as is avoiding bad (or sloppy) practices — but sometimes coding is a very imperfect art.

I also learned a lot about bootstrap grids on this project, since this was the first time I had used that tool. There’re a lot of things I like about it, though I can definitely see how it could be limiting on some sorts of projects — and why more lightweight options or a custom-grid might be better in those cases.