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Co.Lab - A Great Experience

Screenshot of Co.Lab - A Great Experience landing page
Roy Anger
11 February, 2022
2 min read
321 words

Imagine that you're a junior developer (or designer or project manager), and join a company. All of a sudden you're dealing with stand-ups, tickets and user stories, working with a designer, story points and more. You're faced with a steep learning curve to even begin to understand how to integrate with the team.

Enter Co.Lab. Co.Lab is a program for aspiring project managers, designers and developers. You are placed in a cross-discipline team. Each person is responsible for handling the work in their role, with the PM driving the project and team forward.

This was my first exposure to Agile, and it was definitely an eye opener. Getting used to user stories and how to deal with acceptance criteria was new and a great experience. Seeing features broken down into tickets, or stories, about how the user would want to interact with the application was great.

The process wasn't without hiccups and challenges. Learning how to communicate my progress and needs to the group was the largest challenge. No longer could I spend a day or two just working away on code. Now I needed to make sure that my team was in the loop.

Working with another developer was also an amazing experience. Learning each others strengths and weaknesses was only the start. Working on branches, committing code and working with each other required learning and adapting to how I had coded before Co.Lab.

Understanding how to handle tickets and work in branches for each ticket was, from a coding perspective, one of my key takeaways. While our Co.Lab group was small, it let me understand how that process would flow with a team of any size.

At the end of the day, Co.Lab taught me things I would never experience otherwise without landing a full time role. No amount of programming courses, articles or youtube videos would have ever exposed me to this side of the role.

Last edited: 19 April, 2022