What you can learn from Failure

Here's everything I learnt as a project team leader (primarily as a Lead for the ACM PESUECC AIEP 2021) ~ Anirudh

The AIEP is an Industrial Experience Program organized by ACM PESUECC. Students are allowed to pitch project ideas, and work with other students in a collaborative and guided environment to build the project proposed, and in the process, learn industry-level skillsets.

This post is an attempt to chronicle my experiences as a project team leader, where I was responsible for leading a team of student developers to plan, design and implement a full-stack web application. Due to circumstances out of our control, we were forced to stop work on the project midway, but it was still and invaluable learning experience for myself, and I hope, for the rest of the team.

What was the initial/planned scope of the project?

The project aimed to build Luncher, a canteen management system that aimed to solve the problems faced by college canteens during the initial phases of COVID-19 recovery in India. It aimed to use online ordering to help prevent crowding at the canteen itself, and to empower canteen owners and stakeholders with detailed analytics and predictive capabiltites.

Planned Tech Stack

Backend

Frontend

We also used Jira and Confluence to plan the work, and assign it to team members.

Status

This project did not move past the planning and design phase, save for initial "hello-world"-style setup commits. To the credit of our lead designed and Front-End developer, we did have a full design template and guideline to work with, which was excellently executed.

However, tangible learning outcomes included the entire team being familiar with the basics of React and Django REST Framework, as well as knowing how to use Git and Github in a collaborative setting, as well as being more comfortable with being able to brainstorm to decide on features that need to be built.

Challenges

Learning Points

The AIEP has been, by far, the most involved project i've worked on.


Published on: 2022-01-03
Tags: learning experiences leadership project management developer experience featured Collections: musings