Collab Lab 62 Recap

The Collab Lab is a program that seeks to connect aspiring and early-career developers with experienced mentors. Over the course of 8 weeks teams of four work together to build a real application and participate in pair programming, office hours, retrospectives, demos, and code reviews. At the end of every cohort, there is an optional two-week Career Lab session for participants, who are colloquially referred to as Collabies, to prepare for interviews so that they can land a job in the industry.

The TCL 62 team was made up of:
Collabies:

• Archaa S (she/her)
• Hans Schroeder (he/him)
• Jenny Chou (she/her)
• Magda Slifierz (she/her)

Mentors:

• Grace de la Mora (she/her)
• Jeremiah Fallin (he/him)
• Lyle Schemmerling (he/him)

Before joining TCL all of our Collabies had little experience working with a software development team. Eight weeks and 597 Slack messages (plus 121 between us mentors 😁) later, our Collabies now show tremendous growth in a lot of meaningful areas. Together they learned the fundamentals of what makes a great development team.

The main point of The Collab Lab is to develop experience with Agile methods and gain experience working with others collaboratively (hence the name). Having coding experience, preferably with React, is required but Collabies come in with a diverse knowledge base. This means that there are usually many small cracks in their coding skill set. Pair Programming is a great exercise to gain experience working with others, to help fill in those cracks, and to get work done with the power of teamwork.

TCL 62 started at a brisk pace. The first few issues are meant to be a dip into the water to get an understanding of how to use some of the tools development teams use at a very basic level. Git and GitHub are extremely common and most developers have used them or something in the same realm, but creating branches, getting a PR review, and reviewing others’ code is something developers don’t have the opportunity to do when working on personal projects. Our team got up to speed on how to use all of these tools very quickly.

Around week 5 our team ran into a very common issue on development teams: missing deadlines. Our issues from the previous week had been worked on but were not complete. Other obligations and the complexity of the issues got in the way. We planned out how our team was going to catch up and our team continued knocking out issues. We gradually caught up and then moved on to the fun part.

Weeks 7 and 8 are where Collabies have the most agency over the minimum viable product. It’s also a time when different strengths and skills are used compared to writing code and following issues. Collabies plan out the entire design of the app, choose visuals, a design system, create the issues for writing that code, and then take on those issues to turn their vision into a real product. It gives developers experience with Figma if they’ve never used it before and lets the team make a technical decision that influences the whole rest of the project: how is it going to be styled?

These last 2 weeks are when our collabies really stood out. During the first of these weeks not much code was written, instead our team presented some great mockups and wireframes. The last week of the cohort, the mentors didn’t have to assign any issues: the team self-assigned them when they had time and when their previous issue had been completed. It showed a great deal of coordination and asynchronous teamwork.

At the end of the 8 weeks the project was nearly complete. The demo showed a styled product with previously implemented mechanisms revamped to use more modern designs. It could have been finished as-is but our team tacked on a week 9 so they could finish the remaining portions that hadn’t been completed. Our team is dedicated to finishing their product.

Shout out to our collabies:

• Archaa S (she/her)
  • Showed a ton of executive skill orchestrating the styling issues and pitching the design system the team ended up using (Chakra-UI).
• Hans Schroeder (he/him)
  • Great communication skills: made sure everyone knew where he and his pair programming partner were finding success and needing assistance.
• Jenny Chou (she/her)
  • Set up all of our acceptance criteria for the styling portion of the app making sure that everyone knew clearly what was left to be done.
• Magda Slifierz (she/her)
  • Asked tough questions during code review to make sure everything worked to fit the AC and tested pull requests thoroughly. Also worked from Poland for the first few weeks of the program.