About The Collab Lab Program
- Project type: Client-side JavaScript application
- Tech stack: React for UI development, Firebase for both database and hosting,
- Team size: 4 developers
- Project duration: 60 hours per developer (6 hours/week over 10 weeks)
Successful Collab Lab developers came in having already learned basic web development and programming concepts. We didn’t teach coding; we taught collaboration! While you didn’t need a ton of experience, we encouraged participants to have completed the equivalent of a coding bootcamp, where they had learned (at a minimum) basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and had completed a project or two in React.
Visit our developers page to learn more about each of the early career engineers who contributed to The Collab Lab!
What We looked for in applicants
While we are no longer accepting applications, here’s a look at the questions we previously asked prospective participants:
- Name
- Pronouns - Your identity is important to us.
- Region - Depending on mentor availability, we ran teams in North America, Latin America, and Europe/Africa.
- Time Zone - Our teams were based in North America, Latin America (in Spanish), and European/African time zones. 🌎🌍
- Do you agree to abide by The Collab Lab Code of Conduct? - This was non-negotiable. To participate, everyone had to agree to follow the Code of Conduct.
- Link to a code repository (e.g., GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc.) or other example of your work - We used GitHub to host our projects. This was mostly about seeing examples of your work, and linking to a React project was the best approach.
- What do you hope to learn from participating in The Collab Lab? - We wanted to understand your motivations and aspirations to form teams that could learn and support each other.
- What have you done to learn coding so far? - We asked this to better understand your coding journey. There was no right or wrong answer, just insight into your learning process.
What happened after applying?
There were two possible outcomes:
🤗 Participants were accepted. Yay! We’d be in touch with next steps.
😥 Participants weren’t selected this time, but we encouraged them to try again in an upcoming cohort!
We always had more applicants than we had slots. If participants were qualified, but the numbers just didn’t work out, we let them know and encouraged them to apply again using the same information. If we evaluated their experience and determined they didn’t meet the minimum requirements, we informed them so they could improve their chances for the next application window.
This meant that participants might have needed to apply multiple times to be selected. The good news was, they always knew where they stood!