The latest cohort at Collab Lab wrapped up this week. We ran four teams concurrently for the first time and I had privilege of mentoring TCL-13 along with Indira Gutierrez, Eddie Solar and Andrew Hedges. TCL-13 consisted of Audra Turuta, Rebecca Bompiani, Shayne Sebro, and Rachel Fischoff. Over the span of 8 weeks our developers worked together to create a Smart Shopping List that predicts when you'll need to purchase items again using React, Firebase & Netlify.

From day one this group was sassy, supportive and cohesive. By our second weekly meeting it felt as though they had been working together as a group for much longer. They had a great cadence, scheduling pair programming and getting pull requests in early enough in the week for both peer and mentor reviews to take place. They scheduled extra meetings in addition to our weekly meeting when they had group decisions to make like choosing a design and a CSS framework. They were excellent at taking feedback about their project structure and implementing changes to make their coding experience in the future easier.

In addition to their programming skills, all of our participants brought their individual personalities and skills. Audra brought a great energy to the group. She was enthusiastic and created a space cohesive to collaboration. She is also skilled at taking a topic and breaking it down for explanation. Rachel put herself out there early in the project by giving a public lightning talk on caching. She asked great questions about different aspects of the project should or shouldn't be implemented in a certain way causing the team to do some great research before making decisions. Shayne gifted the group with his design skills and created beautiful design docs for the team to follow during the design portion of the project (shown below). He was positive, patient and thoughtful with his comments and questions. Rebecca dove into the documentation for each new library or framework the group used on the project and explained new concepts and ideas to the team.

Each week the mentors were newly impressed as the team embodied the purpose of Collab Lab by improving their programming and collaboration skills. It is our humble opinion that you should hire them ASAP.