1. State of the art, project management and documentation¶
The first week of Fabri for me began even before Fabri actually started. Our core local mentor Rico very graciously scheduled for us to meet online and run us through everything ovearchinigly, and got us to meet Mina and Kae.
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Previously to this, we had been running around anxiously trying understand how best to prepare, mentally of course, but also with all the material and equipment lists to ensure our cohort's Fabri journey could be as smooth as possible.
The morning of day the course started, we were sent a chain of emails regarding logins and signups. But nothing prepares you for when it actually begins…
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What the week looked like:¶
The First global session was spent talking and being introduced to all the global participants & students and all the amazing Lab supervisors and mentors. Hearing from them about the varied educational & professional backgrounds that everyone has come from, re-enforced why choosing to do Fabri was the best decision i made this year. From a home schooled student to well established professional, everyone has come together to upskill and learn more, and that is exactly what i had been missing these past few years of working. A community to learn from and where knowledge is shared.
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As anxious and excited as i was for the First ‘Class’, i left the three hour global session thinking that damn we didn’t study anything today! And this was my first lesson in Fabri, expectation and time management. You see, if we haven’t studied anything in the session, that would mean that i will need to account for more hours per day (more than i had previously accounted for, since i also have a full time job, like some of our global cohort), to learn what needs to be done.
Day 2 of week 1 was our ‘official’ introduction to the course, where our Mentors planned for very cute ice breaker sessions, which gave us all a chance to get to know each other. Coincidentally, these 2 days of Fabri were a holiday for me from work and it gave me an opportunity to get a headstart on the assignment for the week. Our amazing mentors shared with us their personal individual hacks and cheat sheets, along with a small list of tutorials. Knowing that things still seemed like going over our heads, we requested for another session to clear doubts, that we hopefully have, once we go over all the tutorials that were shared. I left feeling a lot more sorted, and ready to jump into all the software downloads and catching up on tutorials.
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Luckily for our Day 3 tutorial, we kept asking all the workflow questions, learnt about softwares that needed to be downloaded, encoded, decoded, mac issues, way around those mac issues, file formats, compression, batch compression, website linking, cloud hosting, and so on. It was a LOT, but this is the point when to my mind, i had absolute clarity of my way forward.
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You see, as someone with ADHD, before i begin a project, i need to be able to understand the visible structure of work flow & work management, before i can begin. It is a boon and a bane. And unless i can understand the logic of what is happening, the pieces never fit together. Making websites has been the bane of my existence, since i never could see the puzzle pieces come together for when i tried building my own from scratch. That insight helped me too this time, coz the limited understanding of how to manage workflow, was now laid out in a perfect structure by our mentors.
Work Flow:¶
1. Material List¶
Since I am the first batch at the Somaiya School of Design Fabri Node (that was registered this year), we had been in touch with Anastasia to help us setup a material and equipment acquisition list. However, this google sheet is very rightly, unprintable, uncopyable and unshareable. So we sat down and created a digitised copy of the entire sheet, along with adding details of what is and isn’t available on-site in our SSD, FabLab and Bioriidl stock. The stock check was very graciously done by our entire extended team: Pranav, Jesal, Apeeksha, Dinesh and Nitish.
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2. Websites & logins¶
One day before the course started, i received emails from Fabri to setup our login accounts that we will be using to access the internal FabLab network, my Gitlab account, my Evaluation Portal and my Mattermost access. All of these are to be logged into, in this specific order, using the registered email id and password sent in the emails. I also went ahead and installed the Mattermost app across all my Mac devices (laptop, phone and ipad)
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3. Notion¶
I spent the Day 2-3 laying out a structure to what my workflow needs to be for the 3 months (for now). I setup a notion page (shoutout to Rico for showing his) and this was a nudge to explore and learn tools and applications i had been pushing aside for a while. My notion page is a collection of all links and tutorials shared, every valuable tab opened on my Safari that week, deadlines, details from the Fabri website and DATES DATES DATES.
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4. Google Drive/ Doc¶
After seeing the tutorials, i have also figured my current workflow for the time being which will be writing down my notes and brain dump for the week on Google Docs and while simultaneously testing & understanding the coding. For this, i setup a folder on my Google Drive, with a base template of Google Docs labeled for all the 13 taught sessions, so i have everything organised and ready, for when the inspiration comes, to write.
For this week’s assignment, i first wrote on the google doc, and then copy-pasted the text on the webpage coding application. According to my workflow plan, if the content is ready, adding it on to the webpage coding will make for more efficient task and time management.
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Documentation¶
Tools, Softwares & Applications¶
All across the various webpages, presentations and google sheets that list down the tools and softwares needed for each session, the sheer amount of data is just overwhelming and too much to digest at once. For myself, i had decided to take each week as it comes, and download softwares as and when required. The only thing i prepped before hand is ensuring my laptop had enough storage space to deal with the surge of new installations.
To begin with, the mentors advised us to download VS Code which is the Code editor of choice and to have a look at this tutorial to help familarise us with the software and it’s capabilities.
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I really like the VS Code interface rather than the web.ide option of writing code within the GitLab page, and will continue using that in my foreseeable workflow. Moreover, VS Code allows for a live preview of how the webpage will look like as you work on writing and editing the code, unlike web.io where you need to save and refresh at every stage. For me, being able to see live alongside on my screen feels better, so i can edit and correct simultaneously on the go.
The coding language we will be useing to write the code on VS Code is Markdown which exists within the application. I reffered to this video to get a quick tutorial of the language. It covers all the basic capabilities that i will be needing for the documentation process. I also have the digital cheatsheet for Markdown on my Notion.
For me, the thing i couldn’t wrap my head around was how will the code on an application on my Desktop (VS Code) update the details of my website on GitLab cloud. This was explained to us by our mentors that for my workflow, i would first need to download Git on my laptop and sync the application with the website login. This part seemed straightforward and logical.
However, getting to setup GitLab with VS Code has been the most mentally exhausting part of this entire assignment. So far i have shuffled between Xcode, Terminal, VS Code and hours of google searches and youtube videos. Spent 2 days trying to figure out how to connect my VS Code to my GitLab repository.
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In the meanwhile, i downloaded a .zip vesion of the FabLab GitLab repository to begin experimenting with writing in Markup and updating the contents on the Website from my Google Docs. For Day 4-5, I have given up any hopes to be able to solve this myself and waiting for a miracle here.
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Updated strategy on Day 5:
- download the GitLab repository on my desktop
- upload the folder on VS Code Workspace
- use the existing template and add content from my google doc
- edit the code in VS Code with Preview mode on
- copy & paste this code back on to GitLab web.io
- commit the website and hope this works!
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Updated strategy on Day 6:
- all the text has been edited and the relevant code written
- opening the WebIDE Edit option on GitLab account and pasting the code
- have added an About Me folder as well, along with adding the relevant pictures
- still unable to link images to the webpage, most probalbly because of improper hosting locations
Learnings & Insights¶
Steps i would take, if i could re-do this (for Mac only)
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People to thank for this week¶
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