The Collab Lab is about collaborating to build an application by early-career developers with the guidance of experienced mentors. They get to do code reviews, pair programming, and retrospectives. This article is a recap of the collab lab 2022 Q2 cohort for group tcl-44.

The developers:

Jimena Miguez

Oluwatobi Oloyede

Reda Baha

Debbie Dann

The Mentors:

Elit Cenk Alp

Golfo Vasiliou

Chiamaka Umeh

A Recap

Over the course of 8 weeks, four very energetic and enthusiastic early-career developers collaborated remotely to build an application called the smart shopping list. The smart shopping list learns a user's shopping habits and predicts when items are due to be bought next. At the beginning of every week, the developers were divided into 2 groups and assigned a task that they will implement during the week. After the implementation, they would make a pull request with a description of what the feature was about and screenshots where necessary. The pairs reviewed each other's pull requests and provided feedback. After that the mentors also reviewed and approved the pull requests before they were eventually merged into the main branch. During the weekend the whole team would have a sync meeting to go through the features implemented the past week and then tasks for the following week.
We also went through some learning modules on Accessibility, git and pair programming during the sync calls.

I and the other mentors watched the developers collaborate effectively on this project with so much enthusiasm and empathy. They all already had some form of experience building frontend applications prior to joining The collab lab. They all got to learn to use a new technology they were not familiar with before - firebase firestore. They also learned remote collaboration and most importantly communication.
We used slack as the primary communication platform and GitHub projects for project management.
As we progressed, the quality of code reviews, pull requests, and communication skills improved.
They were very eager to learn, they helped each other unblock, they went to research where it was necessary and delivered on the tasks they got each week.

This is what some of the developers had to say about the experience.

Before joining TCL the main thing I was missing was working with a team and organizing my work within it.
TCL helped me build confidence in dealing with git and GitHub, now I write well-structured pull requests and give feedback confidently through code review.
The other thing I've Improved during TCL is my communication skills, I learned how good communication through slack can lead to great visibility and everybody knows where the project is heading! - Reda

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Before starting the Collab Lab, I just had a couple of solo projects. By the end of the cohort, not only my coding and teamwork skills improved immensely, but I also landed my first job as a Frontend Developer. I learnt a lot of about React, Git, Github, how working in a remote team works and how to appropriately talk about coding. All of this in a friendly and safe environment with awesome talented devs, which gave me the confidence to succeed at job interviews. All in all , participating in the Collab Lab is one the best decisions I ever made! - Jimena

The project demo

You can check out our last sync meeting where the developers presented the final finished application here and the project on Github here

Early career developers looking to be a part of The Collab Lab can visit our website for more information.