This post is way overdue, but I have to take a moment and brag about this amazing group of people; has it really been a month since our last meeting?!

The Collab Lab is an organization that pairs early-career developers with mentors for an 8-week project. The main focus of the program is to provide developers with an opportunity to work in an agile environment and, of course, pair programming! While each group is unique, the developers of TCL-36 really stood out with their incredible technical and collaborating skills.

The Team

Developers

Lindsey Dinkel 😼 - attacks new challenges with a passion, driver of adopting new tech (who starts with TailwindCSS on day one?!)
Shelley McHardy 🔥 - amazing organizer and forward thinker, de-facto dev lead
Alena Miadzvedskaya 🐻 - technical and PR whiz, data and refactor wrangler
DJ Taylor ✨ - great at identifying code improvements, reliable rough-to-polish PR transformer

Mentors

Eddie Hinkle
Rudi Psenicnik
Lauren Yu

The Project

The Smart Shopping List project is based on iNeedToBuy.xyz. Teams are provided with a list of tasks, and, each week, they are split into two pairs that tackle a single Github issue. Once the issue is complete, they create and submit a PR, which is then reviewed by the other pair as well as by the group mentors. Here are just a few examples of topics covered in the GitHub issues:

• React Router
• Firebase: CRUD
• Input Validation
• Accessibility
• Styling

The Final Product

During the last two weeks of the project, groups are given more freedom to style the application and add additional features. This group excelled during this period, primarily due to the great degree of trust among the developers. During this time, they self-organized and created custom issues, they pushed themselves by exploring TailwindCSS (which was new to 3 of the 4 devs), and they worked asynchronously (while keeping in close contact) to get everything done in time. In addition to creating a beautiful application, this group was dedicated to quality, accessibility, adding new features AND going back to improve upon past code.

To see learn more, check out their repo, which includes a beautiful readme, or visit the live application!

Conclusion

I could go on and on about the ways in which this group was a dream team, but the thing that sticks out the most in my mind is that they were so incredibly kind, understanding and generous with each other. If you have a spot available on your dev team, don’t hesitate to scoop up one of these amazing developers; move quickly as they’re being hired left and right!