I Didn’t Know It’d Be This Hard: People Person
August 2021: It began in our fifth semester, before we had even taken the Software Engineering (RPL) course. During the holidays, one of my current teammates, Fathan, and I collaborated on a freelancing project. I opted to take our RPL course with Fathan because of our previous experience working together. We ended up collaborating with another pair, Ilma and Nopal. Dion joined the group as the deadline for submitting our teams approached.
January 2022: The five of us had an excellent understanding of each other’s strengths, limitations, and potential at this stage. We had intended to continue taking PPL with this group. Unexpectedly, an announcement was made announcing that each team should consist of 7 individuals. Ilma invited Aldi and Darren to round out our team to seven people.
The majority of us had over a half-year to bond, but that doesn’t imply it was an effortless process. To ultimately discover the sweet spot where our team could properly synchronize, it took a lot of understanding, acceptance, and calendar matching. We had some silly misunderstandings in the beginning and I’m not sure if we even started out loving working with each other. However, we put effort into detangling one other’s personalities, despite our inability to figure out whether someone is lying or not.
This is an image taken from the first sprint when we decided to go to our campus to set up for developing Badaso LMS. Before we could make any progress, we were suddenly asked if we wanted to help shoot a tutorial video for conducting offline exams. We said yes and managed to have fun while earning a box of free lunch before going back to setting up. After such a refreshing start, we made quite the progress, then decided to go spend the evening eating BBQs.
Other than that one meet up, we mostly spend meetings and daily standup on Discord. Not only on scheduled meetings, we often spend time on Discord whenever we got stuck or found a bug that seems impossible to figure out on our own. Discord has made communication with one another much more efficient and coordinated.
The fathan-pls-help voice channel exists because when any of us don’t know how to do something, Fathan usually knows how :). Also, these are the voice channels for our formal meetings.
I have tried reading a bunch of articles and posts on what makes a great team, but at the end of the day every single person mix differently, and I am simply happy to be a part of this amazing team.