This is my first week participating in The Collab Lab.

I decided to join because, while searching for a full-time role as a developer, I realized that working on my own projects was not providing me with a me a big part of what a developer job is about. I found myself missing the experience of collaborating with others to build something together and the opportunity to improve my communication and presentation skills.

The main goal for this week for me was to familiarize myself with the tools we will be using and also meet the great team I will be working with. We worked in pairs on a first issue and got our first PR merged.

Also, I spent some time going through the learning modules that covered Git, Agile, Pair Programming, Code Reviews, and Communication for devs.
Especially enjoyed the last one, which talks about different types of communication but focuses on async communication in the form of Code Comments, PRs, and Docs. Here some notes:

Docs

When writing documentation (but can be applied to when writing PRs, issues, and in general as a rule for async com) write for the person who knows the least but also optimize for the person who needs a quick reference taking applying a nice formatting.

PRs

• ✨ Add screenshots, video examples, etc
• 🔗 Link useful resources
• 👀 Self review before asking others to review
• 👉🏼 Keep PRs small and scoped to ease code reviews

Comments

Code comments should not explain what the code is doing but focus on the why is doing that. Check out this great presentation The Art of Code Comments by Sarah Drasner on this subject.

Learning highlights of my week

One thing I learned this week was the -git-push --force-with-lease option: this is an option that allows you to update the remote branch after checking that the history you are updating is exactly what you rebased and want to replace. This way your changes will not overwrite any work on the remote branch if more commits were added to it.

On Sundays, we have our Weekly Sync where we will demo the features we worked on during the week and will be presented with the issues for the next one.
I had a great experience during my first week at The Collab Lab. I participated in a pair programming session, conducted a code review, and had enjoyable conversations with other team members.
I am thrilled to be part of the first 2024 Cohort, and looking forward to continuing our work together to see what we can create.

See you next week! Thanks for reading :)