The Collab Lab's tenth team (affectionately known as TCL-10) wrapped up its eighth and final week. Every team brings unique skills and talents; TCL-10 amazed us with their advanced collaboration and high-level technical skills. I would say you should be quick to snap them up (if you can---some are already hired!), but I selfishly want to hog them for my own team.

This amazing group was comprised of: Kat DeVrieze, Lauren Yu, Quinn Lashinsky and Tiana Johnson. Mentors included Keeley Hammond, Lauren Beatty, and Matthew Hughes (a Collab Lab alum!).

While in The Collab Lab, 4 developers split into pairs every week to tackle 2 stories from the project's backlog. We emphasize collaboration throughout: managing asynchronous communication, pair programming, code review, version control, and project planning. A typical week flows from assignment of issues on a Sunday, to perhaps submitting a pull request(PR) by Thursday. We mentors knew we had a special group when both pairs had their first PRs up and ready for review by Tuesday afternoon!

TCL-10 highlights:

• 💻 Exceptional code review! We were blown away by how insightful, helpful and compassionate they were in their code reviews...from the beginning!

• ⏲️ They got ahead of schedule! Because they were so skilled, TCL-10 managed to easily tackle stories from the backlog weeks ahead of schedule.

• 🤔 Forward-thinkers! TCL-10 looked ahead at upcoming issues to understand where the app was headed, and set themselves up for technical success with flexible and thoughtful architecture.

• 🧠 A complete re-write of the dreaded "estimates" function! Participants build a smart shopping list which sorts a shopping list based upon how frequently an item is purchased. The app comes with a pre-defined function that estimates the next purchase date, but this group wrote their own from scratch...a Collab Lab first!

• 👩‍🎨 They created their own design system!!! Although none of the participants were designers, they created their own design system in Figma, and leveraged MaterialUI's rich API to generate custom styles for their components.

• ✨ Lifting each other up! I never have seen a group of people so quick to give credit to others for success. Each week we were blown away by their generosity of spirit.

The results speak for themselves: