DTR: Define the Relationship

Use this template when conducting DTR with your project partners. It's recommended that you copy/paste this template into your own gist each time you conduct a DTR to take notes on the conversation.

Guiding Questions to Define The Relationship:

1. What are each of our learning goals for this project? What drives us in this project?

• Regan - understand every piece of code, not submit code I don't understand. Better understanding of local storage.
• Susanna - ditto Regan. Learning from eachother, with a deeper understanding of the code and process.
• Nate - excited to learn how to use APIs, to build databases.
• Jani - echo what everyone else said.

2. What is your collaboration style? How do you feel about pair programming vs. divide-and-conquer approaches?

• Regan - working together on zoom.
• Susanna - at minimum pairing on lines of code.
• Nate - tend to prefer divide & conquer with small features/modifications frequent checkins.
• Jani - code together, divide and conquer with research. Pull in mentors and rocks when we're super stuck so we're productive with our time.

3. How do you communicate best? How do you appreciate receiving communication from others?

• Regan - depends on what you're communicating. Zoom, and slack are good. If it's higher priority prefer face to face.
• Susanna - ditto Regan
• Nate - slack DMs are his life priority
• Jani - one on one for personal feedback. DMs good for coordinating. Expect me to be useless reading code on slack.

4. How would you describe your work style?

• Regan - do the thing, console.logs, see it happening. Need the visual. "Let's try it!"
• Susanna - may over pseudocode, afraid to break things. Please challenge me to break shit.
• Nate - fail quickly, fail often. To solution.
• Jani - read out loud! Love trial and error.

5. What are each of our strengths? How can our strengths complement each other? Talking outloud - Regan loves the sound of his own voice. No shame in asking questions. Articulating code we're writing or reading.

6. What’s gone well or poorly in your previous projects?

• Regan - clear and frequent communication if you're unhappy with something that's happening with the collaboration. Set daily goals and celebrate wins.
• Susanna - need a judgement free zone to ask questions and receive support.
• Nate - time management, and time to breath. May be pushing too quickly.
• Jani - no ghosting, keep in touch if you can't work each day.

7. How will we set direction and make decisions as a team? Setting daily goals, stick to our project plan. Be flexible with things that pop up.

8. How will we overcome obstacles? Communicate! Be considerate of eachothers human schedules outside of Turing.

9. What do you need (resources, environment, communication) to do your best work? Sunshine, poms. Pom schedule - not necessarily using a timer, but be conscious of breaks.

10. What scheduling restraints do you have? What are your scheduling preferences?

• Regan - wide open, single guy, sometimes has chujitzu scheduled.
• Susanna - hour to myself in the morning.
• Nate - East coast. Family. Limited availability after class.
• Jani - weekly mentor meetings, and blocked out time for jsFun and solo study.

11. What is your style for giving feedback? Does anything ever hold you back from giving feedback?

• Regan - I’m a big subscriber to positive in public, negative in private. I prefer giving and receiving feedback verbally, considering the element of tone in text.
• Susanna - I'm better at written communication but since that can be tricky with tone, it is sometimes nice to have a follow up conversation.
• Nate - I'll second (or third) what Regan said: public praise, private criticism.
• Jani - if it's positive feedback, public works for me. If it's negative feedback I prefer private verbal, or written feedback.

12. What do you identify as being your biggest strength(s) technically, as they relate to this project? Where do you feel you could use improvement in your technical skills, as they relate to this project? How can our team help support you in improving these skills?

• Regan - I feel strong with CSS and am good with implementing my creativity, I’m okay with HTML, and okay with JS. I’m hesitant to define my level of comfort with JS but I can keep up and get things to(eventually) work. I’m hoping to learn and internalize a lot of what we’ll be implementing on this project.
• Susanna - global overview. Technical improvement on logic.
• Nate - I feel pretty good as an all-rounder; I think I'm okay with JS, HTML, and CSS. I don't know if any of them are strengths, but they're not weaknesses. Hopefully I can solidify writing SRP code with this project.
• Jani - html/css, user interaction, and syntax. I need to work on my function logic to make the thing do what I want it to do.

13. What tools do you want to use to manage the project?

• Regan - Jani I think you nailed it with our project board and everything you’ve organized for us.
• Susanna - Projectboard, inVision, slack. Zoom screen share so we can all learn.
• Nate - Jani did an excellent job setting up calendars, a project board, and even a private Slack channel! Totally on top of things.
• Jani - PR Templates, Github Project Board, Google Calendar, Zoom (there's a green remote control screen feature, and annotations so we can work together).

14. How do you want the group to solve problems when members run into issues with features of the project?

• Regan - I think we should be aware of when our productive struggling becomes unproductive and be ready to lean on our outside resources: mentors, rocks, classmates, etc.
• Susanna - be kind to eachother and utilize mentors and rocks when we're stuck.
• Nate - I think if we get stuck on something, we brainstorm as many resources as we can think of, and split up to access them.
• Jani - I like breaking up for an hour or two to do some solo problem solving/research. If we don't come up with anything, don't suffer for too long. Loop in a mentor or rock.

15. How do you know if a project is successful? How can we achieve that as a group?

• Regan - I agree with Nate that once we get our MVP, I’d consider that as our finish line being crossed.
• Susanna - achieving a MVP with code we fully understand.
• Nate - I think the project will be successful if we achieve an MVP and all four project members feel confident explaining the code. Also I'd love to make at least one part of it neat, pretty, or surprising.
• Jani - getting it 100% done is not as important to me as knowing I understand the code, everything looks clean and DRY, and functions without bugs.

16. How will we recognize each other's successes and celebrate them?

• Regan - I think that we’ve been recognizing each other’s wins successfully so far, and I expect us to be able to keep it up.
• Susanna - I agree with negative being given privately but I love to celebrate others with sharing wins!
• Nate - Thus far, even in the planning stages, I think we've been good at shouting each other out when folks make contributions. I think we'll continue to do that!
• Jani - our slack channel, or simply acknowledging eachother on zoom works great for me!