Horror Footage Findr

I shot the serif

Within the O’Clock training program, over 5 months, the first 4 months were dedicated to learning the fundamentals of fullstack development in JavaScript, both on the front-end and back-end. One of these 4 months was particularly focused on learning React and some of its related libraries (React Router DOM, Redux…). It is this specialization that I chose against one concerning the back-end and API.

With all these qualifications, the last month of the training took the form of what is called a “month of apotheosis”, that is to say a month devoted, in small groups of four or five people (four in our case), to the realization of a personal project. If methodological or organizational advice was given to us before this month, its development was carried out in an almost entirely autonomous way. We were free to choose the methods and the division of work that suited us best according to the qualities and specializations of each of us: the guideline being to keep a professional and rigorous approach to the entire project.

The simulated professional situation of this end of training project, a situation on which we rigorously stuck throughout the month (office hours, frequent meetings, work organization, communication…), was one of our driving forces and, finally, the prominent element of our passage from students in web development, to junior web developers.

The initial idea for the project came to me personally, but the project was indeed conceived, discussed, developed and finalized by a common work of the whole team.

From school project to validation of knowledge

This project allowed me to confront my fullstack knowledge of the developer’s job with all the possible aspects of a project. I was personally able to take part :

  • in the mock-up of the application,
  • to the writing of its specifications, the MVP, the graphic charter and the wireframes,
  • to the realization of a static front-end web interface, then dynamic via React, Redux, and SASS, deployed on Netlify,
  • to the build-up of the back-end part by integrating the security recommendations via NodeJS, Express, PSQL, deployed on Heroku,
  • some test cases and unit tests via Jest,
  • the organization of roles, skills and sprints in agile mode.

After more than 4 months of intensive learning within the O’Clock training, I was looking forward to this month of project to put into practice all the knowledge and skills I discovered on theoretical or semi-practical grounds and confront them to the problems of a project entirely managed by us.

What I did not anticipate, or at least not on this scale nor importance in the lessons I learnt retrospectively, is the importance of group synergy and the full feeling of satisfaction I felt while working with Sophie, Arnaud and Corentin. Horror Footage Findr was above all an adventure between colleagues and friends, and I have the feeling that we succeeded in reconciling professional spirit and a pleasant atmosphere. This is what allowed the project to go through: to listen to the opinions and desires of everyone, to confront them with the individual and collective field of possibilities, to know our strengths and weaknesses and to scale up an entire project according to that.

I had the chance to make the oral presentation of this project at the end of the O’Clock training, which you can find here in video (French). Moreover, this project was used as a support for my Professional Web and Mobile Developer State Certificate.

My complete project analysis, presented during the oral presentation in front of the jury in the context of my defense for the Professional Title in November 2021 is publicly available at this address (118 pages with annexes).