Project Management

A few months ago, I decided to take another serious stab at web development and bring a passion project of mine into a state of fruition that would be presentable to the general public and prospective employers. I decided to continue work on my personal website, blog and portfolio. To manage this project, I employed the project management skills I learned at web development boot camp and as a Full Stack Software Development Intern. I knew I needed a minimum of three things borrowing from agile workflow and scrum methodology:

• A kanban board
• Daily standups
• Sprint retrospectives and planning

The Trello board was updated constantly with cards or “tickets” moving into their respective lanes. Often, larger tasks were broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks with cards of their own. During quality analysis and testing, issues were inevitably discovered, which created more tasks and cards. Pictured above is the Trello board for “Clark Blog” as of the date of this post. What can’t be seen in overflow are 56 more cards in the “Done” lane. As of right now, there are thankfully only 3 additional cards in the backlog, but as my imagination and skills grow, so will that backlog, I am sure!

Quality analysis, testing, and user feedback open issues that you may not realize you had, or spawned ideas for continuous improvement. When managing a project, there is always the dilemma of technical expense, and time management vs. usability. What improvements can I get away with today to meet my time to production goals, and what can be safely stored in the backlog for later versions?

I met with myself daily to update the Trello board and constantly reassess what progress was made, where I was blocked and what could be done differently. My personal iCal was used to set longer sprint goals and the notes app of my Mac and iPhone were used to take more detailed notes when researching solutions to various problems.

I was able to advance in leaps and bounds by sticking with the traditional light/dark mode scenario and marrying the dark/star modes together. This is the perfect example of giving up a feature you really thought you wanted for something that is faster, cheaper, and still delights!

A HUGE part of project management is being agile and realizing when a feature needs to be re-examined or approached from a different angle. I had two major blockers with this website that I had to overcome. First, I was originally determined to not just have light and dark mode, but rather 3 “skins” for my website. I wanted to showcase “day”, “night”, and a third “space” mode. I may eventually still implement this, or experiment with totally different skins/themes. With a greater understanding of React’s theme providers, I am definitely better equipped now to make that happen, but at the time such an endeavor created way too much technical debt and frustration. I was able to advance in leaps and bounds by sticking with the traditional light/dark mode scenario and marrying the dark/star modes together. This is the perfect example of giving up a feature you really thought you wanted for something that is faster, cheaper, and still delights! ✨

The second huge blocker was this obsession with proving that WordPress could be used as a headless API. I know it’s been done and can be done, but then I decided to experiment with a more modern CMS like Sanity.io. I couldn’t believe how much simpler interfacing with Sanity.io could be! Building the blog portion of my website on both the front and back-end became a relative breeze! Farewell for now WordPress, I have been unblocked! 🙌

I am so grateful I have been trained to look at my progress in retrospectives and approach things in different ways when necessary in order to meet goals. If it had not been for what I’ve learned about agile and scrum (as well as grit and atomic habits, something I’ll get to later), I would never have a usable product to begin representing myself in the marketplace. 🙏🏻