Participants
Our participants enter The Collab Lab with a strong baseline of coding skills including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. They leave with experience in how software teams work.
To participate in a Collab Lab cohort means buying into a growth mindset, opening yourself to learning, and taking risks in a relatively low-stakes setting. Seasoned technologists guide these early career developers as they pair program, review each others’ code, and submit & merge pull requests. They are also coached on how to be effective on a fully distributed (remote) team by people who do it every day for a living.
Alums of The Collab Lab report being better equipped to talk about how they work on a team as well as the thought processes behind their work, helping them perform better in job interviews for technical roles. Hire them!
TCL 11 | August 2020 – September 2020
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Brandon
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Kathy
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Stefanie
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Volha
TCL 10 | August 2020 – September 2020
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Kat
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Lauren
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Quinn
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Tiana
TCL 9 | August 2020 – September 2020
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Fabrice
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Leigh-Ann
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Lia
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Mabel
TCL 8 | June 2020 – July 2020
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Ali
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Lily
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Luka
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Shajia
TCL 7 | May 2020 – June 2020
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DeVon
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Megan
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Nabil
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Tanzima
TCL Pilot | May 2020 – June 2020
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Amber
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Ashling
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Jennifer
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Matthew
Cohort 6 | April 2020 – May 2020
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Elise
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Myles
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Sara
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Scott
Cohort 5 | March 2020 – May 2020
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Ashling
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Diane
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Jennifer
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Jon
Cohort 4 | January 2020 – March 2020
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Haley
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Jaela
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Matthew
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Rachael
Cohort 3 | December 2019 – January 2020
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Amber
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Mike
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Monica
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Nikema
Cohort 2 | November – December 2019
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Claudia
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Ethan
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Michelle
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Mindy
Cohort 1 | August – September 2019
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Caitlyn
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Kate
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Scott
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Stacie
Mentors
Collab Lab’s mentors are the lifeblood of the program. All of our mentors are working software developers and engineering leaders. They volunteer their time because they believe in leaving tech better than they found it.
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Adrienne
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Adrienne Lowe is an experienced engineering manager and leader of distributed development and ops teams. She’s given keynotes and technical talks at PyCon, PyTexas, SoutheastPHP, DjangoCon Europe, The Lead Dev, and GOTO Berlin, among others.
Adrienne is a former chef turned coder who loves dreaming up new recipes with her partner, Alan, in “Music City”—Nashville, Tennessee.
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Alejandro
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Alejandro Ñáñez is a Frontend Engineer at Zapier and organizer of React La Conferencia, the first React conference for Spanish speakers in Latin America.
Alejandro lives in Medellín, Colombia, with his fiancé, dog, and 4 cats.
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David
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David Lluna is a Site Reliability Engineer Manager at Flywire.
He lives and works remotely in Valencia, Spain. He is also a mentor in a local free code academy, Devscola.
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Jayson
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Jayson J. Phillips is a Director of Engineering at 2U Inc, currently residing in Oakland, CA.
In his spare time, Jayson also teaches Full Stack Web Development and Data Engineering bootcamps at UC Berkeley Extension & University of Denver, and has served as a mentor & mentor coach for CODE 2040. He’s also an NYC native and will tell you he’s from the Bronx at every irrelevant opportunity.
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Jen
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Jennifer Batara is currently a Software Architect at Tura Labs in Portland, Oregon.
Jen watches way too many PC build Youtube videos and loves playing video games, especially on her Switch!
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Jill
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Jill Kuchman is a Quality Assurance Engineer at Vacasa in Portland, OR. She’s a tech education enthusiast who has written curriculum and taught at bootcamps in both Portland and Nairobi.
Jill enjoys creating in all forms and can usually be found knitting, drawing, out enjoying the sun, or trying out extravagant recipes.
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Joey
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Joey Laguna is a Software Engineer at Skyslope.
Joey is a former musican in various hardcore bands and lives in Sacramento, California with his fianceé. He loves to think about and play D&D!
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Keeley
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Keeley Hammond is a Senior Software Engineer at InVision, and a member of the core governance team for Electron.
She lives and works remotely in Portland, OR with her husband Dave, and her dog Luna.
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LaQuita
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LaQuita Gollman is a Frontend Engineer in Seattle, WA.
LaQuita considers herself a maker in every way and enjoys crocheting, sewing, patternmaking and listening to reality-show podcasts.
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Lars
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Lars Brekken is a Principal Engineer at Olo in New York City.
Originally from Norway, Lars lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and 2 parrots.
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Lauren
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Lauren Beatty is a Frontend Engineer at Treasure Data.
A former opera singer, Lauren lives and works remotely in Minnesota with her husband and two sons.
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Lisa
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Lisa Smith is one of Collab Lab’s points of contact for Code of Conduct concerns and works as an Engineering Manager at Zapier.
Lisa is a founding director of the Raleigh-Durham, NC chapter of Women Who Code. She lives and works remotely in Chapel Hill, NC with her two daughters.
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Matthew
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Matthew Hughes is a Contracted Software Engineer, most recently at GridRival, as well as a volunteer Social Media & Marketing Coordinator with the Portland Jr Dev group.
A world traveler, dual citizen and overall nomad by nature, Matthew currently resides in Windsor, California with his fiancée, RaeLynn.
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Michael
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Michael Sholty is Frontend Engineer at Zapier living in Gainesville, FL.
Michael loves his wife Amanda and his dogs. He loves helping other people. He's also working hard on his emoji game ♥️ 🤩 😅
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Phoebe
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Phoebe Voong-Fadel is a Frontend Developer at Blue Fox Technology.
Phoebe used to work in university administration before being a stay-at-home mum, where she learned to code. Phoebe is a writer for freeCodeCamp and enjoys writing about tech and parenting. She lives in England with her husband and two children.
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Radhika
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Radhika Morabia is a Software Engineer at OpenTable. She is a proud self-taught developer who writes about learning and the tech industry in her newsletter and blog.
Radhika lives in Oakland, California and checks Twitter way too much.
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Scott
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Scott Bergler is currently a freelance software developer.
Scott is a Golang enthusiast and cat whisperer. He enjoys travel, mixed martial arts, and reading magical realism and mid-to-late-century science fiction. He is extrememly envious of Steve Gardner’s nomadism.
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Stacie
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In addition to mentoring and serving as Secretary on The Collab Lab’s Board, Stacie Taylor is one of Collab Lab’s points of contact for Code of Conduct concerns. By day, she’s a Frontend Engineer at Zapier and participated as a developer in Collab Lab’s first ever cohort.
Stacie lives in Sacramento, California, with her 2 young kids.
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Steve
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Steve Gardner is a Frontend Engineer at Zapier.
Steve takes advantage of Zapier’s remote work culture to travel the world with his wife and 2 young kids. We’re pretty sure he’s currently in Melbourne, Australia.
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Tito
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Tito Agudelo is a Frontend & Mobile Engineer at Toptal.
Tito lives and works as digital nomad in Bogotá, Colombia with his wife and his 2 young kids.
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Yves
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Yves Gurcan is the founder of Parallel45.
From Nike to small startups, Yves has worked for companies of all sizes. He’s a senior software engineer who enjoys helping others. For him, being a mentor at Collab Lab is the best way to give back to the community. He’s always looking forward to meeting new people.
Born in France, Yves moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2014. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Board & Advisors
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Craig John Alimo is a Trainer/Educator for the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at San Jose State University. He serves as an advisor to The Collab Lab’s Board on diversity issues and survey design and lives in sunny Richmond, California, with his partner Nancy and their dog, Tessa.
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Kelly de Vries is a Software Engineer at Clarity Innovations, Inc. and organizes the Portland Jr Dev Meetup. She serves as an advisor to the Board on community issues and lives in beautiful Portland, Oregon with her husband Jason and their spunky pup, Otto.
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Michelle Sauque is a Customer Champion at Zapier. She serves as Treasurer on The Collab Lab’s Board and as one of Collab Lab’s points of contact for Code of Conduct concerns.
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Stacie Taylor, Frontend Engineer at Zapier, participated in the first Collab Lab cohort and has served as a mentor for every cohort since. She serves as Secretary on the Board of Directors and as one of Collab Lab’s points of contact for Code of Conduct concerns.
Founder
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Andrew
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Andrew Hedges, Founder of The Collab Lab, is a longtime web developer, engineering manager, and educator. In his day job, he leads fully distributed teams at Zapier, a workflow automation startup. He is an advisor to and former instructor for PDX Code Guild, a coding bootcamp located in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, and serves on the technology committee for Pueblo Unido PDX.
Andrew holds a Masters of Education in counseling and human development from the University of Maryland College Park. He spent 7 years designing and conducting training programs for university staff before making the leap to web development in 1998.
Get in touch!
The Collab Lab is on Twitter @_collab_lab. We post periodic updates about the program on our dev.to channel. Press inquiries may be directed via email to Andrew at andrew@the-collab-lab.codes.