Beginners Guide: The Labs Experience at Lambda School 🧪

🤔 What is Labs and Why Should I be Interested?
"Labs" at Lambda School is a 2 month experience that has been put in place to help students gain real world experience. Lambda does this by allowing a group of remote developers to collaborate on a team and work on a real application with real stakeholders. Yes, you read that right, real stakeholders!

🧬 What is the Project About?

Okay, okay...so now that you sorta know what Labs at Lambda is all about, let's get into the good stuff! I am currently working on a team of 6 amazing remote developers on an application called "SaverLife." SaverLife is a nonprofit company with a goal of helping people save money in a smart and intuitive way. With SaverLife, it's time to say goodbye to budgeting apps that take hours to comprehend and plan for. SaverLife simply takes your bank account info and predicts a budget, personalized for you, based off your past transactions.

🔬 Technical Concerns.

Sure, this all sounds great in theory, but any team is going to have concerns and questions about their application. Our team specifically had a lot of questions for our stakeholders. Lucky for us, we were able to have our amazing "Team Lead" (who acts as a project manager) ask questions to our stakeholder right away to clear up some confusion about the app. Here is a list of some questions we had:

• What are the main must haves for the app? Whether that be a general theme for the app, or naming conventions we need to follow.
• What are some things you want us to avoid for the app?
• Will we need to do any onboarding for users?
• When will we have access to the database and in what form will it be in?

📝 Planning Our Product.

At the beginning of our Labs journey we were given something called a "roadmap." This is basically a todo list of tasks that should be checked off for our SaverLife product. In order to better accomplish these tasks, our team decided to break them down into smaller, less vague, tasks and divide them up among the team using Trello. I will put some screenshots of our Trello cards below 👇

💪 Challenges We Have Overcome.

During Labs there have been many uncertainties, but as a team we have worked hard to overcome them. Here are some challenges we have faced and overcome:

• Not receiving access to the database.
• Being given vague instructions.
• Managing our time between working on our application and other Labs duties.

💰 Where is Our Application Now?

Currently, our team has decided to create a prototype of the SaverLife app. We have many ideas about what components we should implement, we even started building some out! Here is a picture walkthrough of our app in it's current state (mobile first) 👇

Home Page (before login)

Home Page "How It Works" Section

Login Page

Home Page (after login)

Progress Page (after login)

👯‍♀️ Connect with The Team.

Throughout this post I have talked a lot about the amazing team of remote developers that I am working with. Our team has overcome many battles together and I am proud to be working with a strong group of both Web Developers and Data Scientists. Well, here they are...

👨‍🔬 Data Scientists

Alex Pakalniskis - LinkedIn
Michel Laporte - LinkedIn

💻 Web Developers

Christina Harris - LinkedIn
Victoria Topham - LinkedIn
Loc Giang - LinkedIn
Me, Chelsea Wetzel - LinkedIn