Collab Lab: Cohort 25 Recap (Spring 2021🌼)

We have an app 🎉!

Another season of collaborating, learning, and having fun reaches its end as we've wrapped up the Spring 2021 Cohort of Collab Lab!

The entire team, spread around the EMEA region, collaborated remotely while juggling work duties, travel, studying, and other life events to develop a stunning Smart Shopping App 🛒.

Meet the team!

Our developers 💻:

Chenemi A Nigerian medical student who is particularly interested in open-source and applications solving healthcare or other social problems.
Cynthia An open-source enthusiast from Rwanda who aspires to use technology to link people to a variety of opportunities, including high-quality education and employment.
Ibrahim a Microsoft Student Partner from Nigeria. He's studying English education, but he's obsessed with technology and wishes to pursue a career in software engineering.
Katia a journalism Ph.D. originally from Russia and currently living in the UK, who chose to plunge into web development.

The mentors 🔭:

Alex - The lead mentor. Located in France, she did the heavy lifting for this cohort.
Golfo - A second-time collab lab mentor from Greece.
Julia - A former collabie from Austria who returned as a mentor.

The project 🧩:

The goal of the project was to create a Smart Shopping List concept following a blueprint of issues by the Collab Lab using React and Google Firebase.

For eight weeks, the four developers worked in alternating pairs and worked on a single issue. They worked like a professional remote team, communicating synchronously and asynchronously, reviewing each other's code, and holding Weekly Syncs at the end of each week to show their work.

It's amazing what teamwork can do in such a short timeframe. In the beginning, the team followed the project issues closely and then created their own issues in the final week to deliver a polished app, using mostly vanilla CSS with some SASS (quite a feat!). The team also made sure that the app was accessible even testing it out with a screen reader to make sure everything was working properly.

The developers leveled up as a group and individually during the project in a truly inspiring way!

The mentors had worked together before so there was excellent communication and collaboration from the beginning.