I recently spent two months building a chess app in a remote agile team at the Firehose Project — and I still use the knowledge from this project in my real-world coding job! Here are several things my teammates did (and I did my best to do as well) that made them awesome to work with:
1. Review other people’s pull requests (PRs). Usually when a teammate opens a PR with new code, they are contributing functionality to the app that will assist everyone’s work. Review the pull request so that it gets merged quickly! Also, reading and reviewing PRs helps you develop a good overall understanding of the app (and your teammate already did the heavy lifting of writing the code).
2. Help teammates troubleshoot. It’s not a good feeling when you’re struggling with a bug… and no one seems willing to help you! Granted, this feeling sometimes happened to me at 3 AM when literally no one else was awake to help me. But when I took on an intimidating task for the team project (implementing web sockets) and ran into some bugs, it made my day when I woke up from a nap, and a teammate had pulled my code and done a little troubleshooting for me! In general, assistance with troubleshooting also helps the process move faster.
Yikes.
3. Do your work! Helping out your teammates is important, but one of the best ways to help them out might be doing your own work. Make sure you take your fair share of Trello tasks so that no one is shouldered with an unfair burden. Of course, the more code you write, the more you learn — so you’re benefiting from doing your share of the work as well.
4. Don’t just report bugs, squash them. It’s easy to report issues, but people would rather see a PR that resolves a bug than be inundated with tickets complaining about issues.
5. Goof off on the Slack channel a bit. It’s more fun to work with people when you’ve bonded a little and can joke around on the group chat. Distractions and humor can help rejuvenate your mind and keep you sane in the midst of Git disasters and test-driven insanity.
Happy coding!