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📓 Thursday Schedule and Expectations

Welcome to your fourth day of Epicodus! Congrats! You're almost done with your first course section. Hopefully the daily routine is starting to feel familiar — but even if it's not, don't worry. We'll be following a similar routine for the rest of our time at Epicodus.

Here is today's schedule and expectations.

Schedule​

8:00 – 8:30: Dev Team Scrum

The first thing you should do during your Dev Team Scrum is sign in to the Epicodus attendance system. You should also remind your fellow dev team members to do this as well so that no one forgets!

Next, make sure that everyone is present for the Dev Team Scrum:

  • If you are an online student, this includes conducting a connectivity debugging session. Is everyone able to access the voice channel in Discord? If not, take a few minutes to make sure everyone is taking part. Remember, if you have recurring issues, reach out to an instructor. When everyone is connected, you can start your brief group check-in.
  • If you are studying in person, take the time to make sure that everyone who is in your dev team and present for class is together before start your brief group check-in.

As a reminder, Dev Team Scrum includes a brief group check-in to talk about anything that came up during the last class session — such as things you've learned or things that you find exciting or frustrating. This is also a great time to ask each other questions about any content that you might find confusing. As covered in the lesson about working with a dev team, in about 15 minutes, each student in the dev team should answer these 3 questions:

  • What did you work on in the last class session or over the weekend?
  • What are you working on today?
  • What blocks do you have? What is standing in your way?

Once everyone has had a chance to speak, the next step is to find a pair from within your Dev Team and then begin pair programming. If there is an odd number of people in your dev team, there will be one group of three.

8:30 – 9:00: Cohort Scrum

9:00 – 12:00: Pair Programming

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

1:00 – 4:00: Pair Programming

None of the Bootstrap content we are covering today is required for the independent project. However, there's a lot you can do with Bootstrap, so it is still recommended to read through the lessons even if you don't have the time to practice implementing Bootstrap.

4:00 – 4:30: Cohort Scrum to discuss the upcoming Independent Projects

At 4 pm you will join your instructor and classmates for a Cohort Scrum to discuss your first independent coding project that you will complete on Friday. Bring any questions that you may have. Later on in the course when you become familiar with the structure and expectations of coursework, you will not have these meetings.

4:30 – 5:00: Dev Team Retrospective

As a reminder, every day at the end of class you will meet with your dev team to discuss how the day went. We call this meeting a "retrospective". While companies usually don't have daily retrospectives, this is a good practice for students to maximize learning and share work. It's also a great time to get to know your cohort peers.

Here are potential topics to cover in the retrospective:

  • Show and tell: what did you create today? Share your screen and walkthrough your code.
  • What did you enjoy the most?
  • What is a bug you fixed? Share your screen and give a walkthrough.
  • What did you struggle with?
  • Share tips and resources you found useful.
  • Give shout-outs to anyone in your group who has helped you or that you appreciate in general.
  • Discuss what you want to do better tomorrow.

Fourth Day Expectations​

Take note: on short weeks, daily expectations change, and you may cover more or less content on a given class day.

Your first independent project is tomorrow so you'll want to make sure that you have the basic concepts covered. The first lesson of every course section always includes the objectives. Here's this section's objectives: Git, HTML, and CSS Objectives. Also, the final lesson of each course section always includes the objectives as well as more information about the upcoming code review: Git, HTML, and CSS Independent Project.

There are also two lessons that cover Preparing for Your First Code Review, including helpful strategies. As well as a lesson covering Git Expectations for Independent Projects.

Independent projects can be stressful, especially if you're struggling with concepts or have testing-related anxiety. Remember that you'll always have an opportunity to get instructor feedback and resubmit. If you need to review the general process, see Independent Projects and Code Reviews.

Today we'll cover the following concepts:

  • The "cascading" in CSS
  • Classes Versus IDs
  • The basics of Bootstrap, a front-end framework for styling sites

Much of today's content is focused on Bootstrap, a front-end framework that can help us quickly and easily make our websites look nicer. You are not required to implement Bootstrap for this independent project. That being said, you'll generally want your sites to look nice and professional. Bootstrap can help with this. You'll get many more opportunities to work with Bootstrap in future weeks as well — today is just an opportunity to get started.

We also recommend taking the time to practice any concepts that you may still be struggling with, whether that's Git workflow, basic HTML concepts or any other material that will be required for tomorrow's independent project.

Great work getting this far! We're glad you're here and want to do everything we can to ensure your success at Epicodus.