The Collab Lab
About The Project
Over an 8-week period in early 2023, I collaborated with three other early-career developers as part of The Collab Lab. Together, we built a 'smart' shopping list app in React.js. Our team worked under the guidance of three mentors, all professionals in the field, who acted as our project managers & led learning modules on collaborative development strategies.
Project Purpose & Goal
As a team, we focused on pair programming, writing great pull/merge request messages, over-communicating in Slack, demos, retros, and other real-world activities of professional software teams.
Our team's goal was to create a 'smart' shopping list app that can learn the user's buying habits and help them remember what they are likely to need to buy on their next trip to the store.
Lessons Learned
One of the most significant lessons I learned was the importance of clear communication, both in & out of the text editor.
Each week our team was split off into pairs. Each pair completed a weekly story & then reviewed the other pair's PR.
For me, reviewing the other pair's pull request highlighted the importance of writing maintainable & easy to understand code. Additionally, having our team's mentors review the pull requests I worked on was incredibly valuable. Their thoughtful comments really opened my eyes to new ways of working through logic, undoubtedly making me a better programmer.
Collaborating with other developers was a great learning experience. I worked with self-taught developers, those from different bootcamps, and professionals in the field. This helped me expand my knowledge of various coding techniques and approaches.
Volunteering
After my great experience in TCL-61, I remained an engaged member of The Collab Lab community, volunteering until its closure at the end of 2024.
As a volunteer, I helped early-career developers, particularly those from underrepresented groups in tech, gain practical experience in web development by working remotely on real world projects:
- Once potential Collabies got through the application, review, and selection process, their names were forwarded to me. I took care of the organization & logistics of sending acceptance/rejection emails and adding everyone to Slack
- Additionally, I was part of a dedicated team of TCL volunteers, who collectively developed a comprehensive gallery, showcasing all of TCL's past projects. Our efforts included reviving and seamlessly integrating past projects onto live URLs while establishing connectivity to operational read-only databases