Structure
Big picture
Labs as a whole is a condensed version of what the first 6 months to 10 months of a new job in a software company will be like. Generally speaking, HR and your engineering team are going to be your main sources of information on hiring paperwork, benefits information, documentation, company policies and engineering standards, and the like. We don’t really have any true HR paperwork for you to complete, but we will still have plenty of work to do during orientation, rest assured.
BloomTech Labs is structured to replicate real-life experiences inside a development environment. You will be onboarded to your new team, added to google calendar, given access to the Kanban board (Jira), invited to the GitHub organization Bloomtech-Labs and subsequent repositories, given access to the Canvas course Labs (DS), and added to the relevant Slack channels to facilitate communication with your teams and project-wide collaborators. It is a heavy flow of information, but once you get in and start living in it day-by-day, you’ll be a pro in no time!
Once you have access to the GitHub repos, you can set up your local environment (this is where you will find the answer to finish the first CFU in Canvas.) Once setup, run the API using the DS environment variables for MongoDB, run the version endpoint and it will give you a password. Once everything is up and running, it would be prudent to check out the Jira video that Frank Fusco put together as an introduction to Jira as it will be the main source of work during your time here at Labs.
Once onboarded and set up locally, Jira becomes pivotal as it will be the main source of work for implementing the Roadmap. Staff is currently scoping issues at the Story/Task/Bug level and Learners are creating their own Sub-tasks needed to complete the Story/Task/Bug. After the creation of the Sub-task you will be responsible for, we can start to code. This is where the GitHub Workflow is important.
The Workflow itself is rather straightforward in that we create a new branch from main, we add/delete code we write, commit that code, then open a pull request, fill out the template in the description field, and submit. The Workflow will become easier over time the more you do it. One thing to note here is that we’ll let some mistakes be merged so that we can, one create a lesson out of the failure, and two to help you learn from those mistakes here and not at your new job because, depending on the mistake, one developer could cost the client hundreds, thousands, if not millions of dollars in damages. We are a learning environment and as such, we want to give you the opportunity to really make mistakes and learn as failure is an incredible teacher.
Tech Stack
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Platform as a service, hosts your API.
Docker: Containers, for reproducible environments.
FastAPI: Web framework. Like Flask, but faster, with automatic interactive docs.
Flake8: Linter, enforces PEP8 style guide. PyCharm has a built in linter.
Doctest: Easy-to-use testing suite utilizing docstrings.
PyCharm: IDE specifically designed for Python developers. Community version is the one you want.
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