Web Applications and Leading a Team

Okay so it's been a while since my last post and I was going to say that the reasons why I've not been doing anything is because I've been busy at work. While this is true I thought I would take this blog post to be more constructive and delve into what I've been learning/developing whilst at work.

The Application Design

At work I have been the lead developer for a small web application that is going to be used internally to help customer support. I have been responsible for creating the design document, discussing with other developers/stakeholders to develop the requirements and iterate over the design to come to a final solution.

Initial Development

In the early stages of the project I was a sole developer working on the application, I chose Flask (a Python web micro-framework) as the tool for the job. Flask is a great tool for creating web applications, as it takes a lot of the complexities away whilst not being as all encompassing as Django.

As Flask is a micro-framework it has a vast number of extensions that allow you to add extra pieces of useful functionality into your web application. Here are a list of some of the extensions I have used:

• Flask-SQLAlchemy (provides better integration of SQLAlchemy (a Python DB Abstraction Layer))
• Flask-Login (provides user based logins and also deals with session management)
• Flask-Uploads (provides easier file upload functionality)

As the project started to take shape I was given some extra development resources that I would need to lead and give direction to so the project could progress. 

Team Leading

Looking back I didn't do very well as a team leader at the very beginning of the project. I had various problems early on which I now know ways in which to deal with them:

Problem 1: Communication/Lack of Direction

Initially I didn't give enough direction, forgetting that they hadn't been involved in the early development and didn't understand the reasons that some of the design decisions were made.

This lack of direction was made much worse because I was mainly communicating via e-mail or Instant messaging. This ended up with a lot of back and forth and a lot of frustration on both sides.

​After getting some guidance from my manager I decided to set up regular conference calls to actually talk to my teammates in Pune and this ironed out a lot of the issues and also freed up time to actually get some development done.

Problem 2: Python Experience/Development Guidelines

I decided to use Python for the development as there was a lot of other Python developers in the lab which would allow me to seek guidance when I needed it. I didn't take into account that other developers would be working on the project and that they might not have Python experience.

​This lack of experience from my teammates was rather difficult to overcome and there were a lot of large code reviews early on explaining exactly why we do certain things, like string formatting for example:

print "This is my string with a variable: {}".format(my_variable)

print "This is my legacy string with a variable: %d" % my_variable

These small differences along with issues with different people using different tab lengths and not using space-tabs caused the reviews to grow a lot.

After doing a few of these code reviews and also talking to my team via the regular conference calls these issues soon ironed out. I also made it mandatory that all my team must run pylint code analysis before submitting for review. In future I will ensure that all my fellow developers have a style guideline or code analysis application like pylint from the start.

Problem 3: Code Review Turnaround/Time Difference

As I was having to do so many large code reviews early on it meant that these would often take me a while to do. I started off doing these code reviews in the morning, as Pune are five and a half hours ahead of us this meant that they were already half way through their next day when I would get to doing the code reviews. 

I started doing code reviews as soon as the team had them for me, this would mean I could get it reviewed and comments back to them to address in their morning before I got to work. I would then use evenings whilst they were offline to do my own development work.

​This was only a small change but it made the team much more fluid and allowed us to get more tasks done sooner.

Conclusion

So all in all I've learnt a lot, I've now got more skills in Python, Flask and various other frameworks. What I think is more important is that I've learnt how to lead a team much better and I think any future projects would go much more smoothly now that I've learnt these lessons, even if I had to learn them the hard way. I still think I am far from a great leader but I'm a lot closer than I was before this project.

​Cheers :)