My Walk With Lambda Labs

Lambda labs for those who don’t know is the ending curriculum for Lambda School, They have created a condensed iterative team development cycle comprised into 30 days of ideation, planning, and execution.

Our team was selected to work with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for our project, If you don’t already know The Boy & Girls Clubs Of America or BGCA are a national voluntary organization focused on providing after-school programs to young people. Our stakeholder was interested in analyzing the emotional sentiment of participating young people/s at these after-school programs using a web application. As a team we iterated over what needs the stakeholder communicated and the product crafted turned out to be close to an Association Management System or AMS, this AMS allowed for the manipulation of program and user data that was currently in use by the system, navigation of a dashboard type UX, the generation of unique QR code IDs for the attendants of after-school programs, also the upload of Comma Separated Values or CSV files to populate the system with user and program information.

That’s quite a bit of functionality in just a month, off bat I was internally panicking, lets break down how my team and I were able to break these tasks down into a final product.

First and second week of Labs were probably the most chaotic weeks of my entire Lambda experience. They threw new standards for development regarding components, dependencies, git flow etc.. while also expecting a complete and professional planning experience consisting of diagrams, wireframes, and flow-charts. I took on the design lead role which allowed for the opportunity of making wireframes crafted from team input. These wireframes were a big contribution to the product and I personally believe they gave my team and I a general sense of direction.

Once these two weeks were up we had a solid foundation of design and a really strong hold on what our product needed to achieve. Which allowed for launch into development!

Going through-out my CS course I had been away from my front-end environment for a few weeks too many and definitely felt the rust oxidizing in my brain. This was a reawakening for me, I was able to clear up some of my mind fog by idealizing and executing a big part of the project, the file & component architecture. This allowed for my team to better understand how their contributions would be rendered in our application and gave access to basic navigation of a dashboard type User Experience or UX.

Our project in the end didn’t end up using a global state management system, but during this execution phase I was able to adopt and learn a new and exciting Redux paradigm called redux-ducks, this paradigm allowed for the use of reacts hook API, while also consolidating state controllers into their own consolidated files. Genuinely the cleanest set-up for state I have personally worked in and was a blast to get my hands a little bit dirty with it, I was able to learn some asynchronous troubleshooting through this process with my dispatch not firing at the right time for my component to receive state correctly. through the process of playing around with the placement of my useDispatch in relation to how the component in question was being rendered and cleaning up some useEffects I was able to solve this problem. Overall a great learning experience and I’m looking forward to using this framework on another project in the very near future.

In the future this product will be used by BGCA clubs across America, with the foundation that we’ve laid there is definitely room for a full AMS to be developed. I think this Labs experience while extremely intensive and at times draining has given me insight to a few very big lessons about working with others, what to expect from the unexpected, and overall generally improved my soft skills. While I definitely believe Labs gives great experience I definitely had my fair share of criticisms. Due to the nature of the course being only 1 months time I feel as though some aspects of our teams development stages were rushed to the point where I think if given more time to understand; the overall outcome of the application would have improved. Beyond time constraints, Labs expects a lot out of you, if you couldn’t tell already and on top of all the work previously mentioned, they introduce lessons during your work times regarding content that isn’t very intrinsic to the main focus of developing an application. While I believe Lambda needs to have measurement of progression I don’t believe they should take time out of team development to press the need for it.

I am super grateful to have been a part of the development of this application and this Labs experience in general, super huge thanks to Lambda and a huge screaming shout out to my team through-out Labs-33, Thanks for the read!

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