The origins of Teenage Mutant Ninja COBOL Turtles
Another week down, another step closer to programming genius. Some weeks, a full step might be an ambitious target, with some even feeling like a step backwards. But this week I’m feeling good, I’m confident in saying I am a better programmer than I was last week. Yay.
The days of a new topic each week have gone, lost to bank holidays and longer topics. So after a lovely bank holiday weekend spent basking in the sunshine, I returned to completing the cobol intro challenges. Following on from my success last week, I was able to continue working through the challenges, adding complexity to my program as I went. As with any programming, it wasn’t all plain sailing, but some pair programming and chats with my trainer and I was able to progress with relative ease.
From Wednesday onwards we started a new topic, this time focusing on some of the broader skills involved in being a software engineer; teamwork. The task for the next week is to build a basic Bulletin-Board-System with a variety of screens and features using COBOL. The real objective however, was to work effectively as a team, take a specification, split it into tasks, distribute the work, ensuring everyone had something to progress and the support they needed. We were exploring elements of agile working; stand-ups, retros, progress boards and sprints.
We had our kick-off session and we were given the brief, split into teams and off we went! Admittedly, I found myself quite excited about the challenge; I love a good excuse to be organised, allocated tasks, making notes, maybe even an opportunity for some pretty stationary?
We began by meeting as a group and tackling the biggest challenge of all; coming up with a team name. After a few minutes of throwing ideas around and desperately trying to come up with a witty COBOL pun (a much harder task than it seems), we gave up on trying to be comedic geniuses and instead just stuck the word COBOL somewhere.
We wanted a team name to reflect us, our passion, our thrive to achieve and learn, our love of all things COBOL so we took the obvious choice and became the Teenage Mutant Ninja COBOL Turtles (honestly I don’t know).
Inspired by our amphibian crime-fighting counter-parts we set about with the rest of the preparation work; we established some team working practices, set up a slack channel, created a trello board, ready to write our tickets and track ‘To-Dos’, ‘Done’ and ‘Reviewed’ tasks.
All set-up and ready to go we then faced our next challenge, erm…where do we start? We’ve grown used to a handy walkthrough or guide to lead us through a challenge in a sensible order. This time we were left with a vague specification, a couple of user-stories and not much else. Eventually we managed to split some tasks down, unsure about exactly how we would go about them, but reassured by the fact we had some form of plan.
After an afternoon split in pairs we found we had made some progress but all reached the same sticking point. Reunited to our full strength of 4 we spent some time trying to work our way out of our rut. A few hours later and we hadn’t really got much further, we had well and truly hit a wall.
A few swapped messages with the other group and it became clear we had hit a common problem. Reassured by the fact the other group had reached the same road-block as us, we were able to form a bigger team temporarily to discuss the problem with our coach; because even an elite team of Ninja Turtles need friends. Rejuvenated by our discussions we met as a quad again to discuss the plan of attack. We managed to split the tasks down further, individually working on different challenges, or different approaches in an attempt to make a breakthrough.
This proved to be an effective solution with several of us making progress in individual challenges and ultimately gradually getting closer to a working solution for our problem. Brains fully melted from a week of hard work, we decided to move the COBOL aside for the last hour and have some fun. We invited the other group to join us and ended the week in a spirited game of online Pictionary; a good end to a week focused on working together and building relationships.
