CodeLab
Updated 7.13.2023
A New Community at UC Davis
After grinding away on our lower-division courses, a few friends and I felt there lacked a strong computer science community at UC Davis. Lecture halls were huge, students were disconnected, and there was little opportunity to apply our newly developed coding skills. When the pandemic pushed our college experience online, these issues were only exacerbated.
And so, we build CodeLab, a project-based software development organization at UC Davis. We started off informally, recruiting 7 of our friends to make up our first cohort of general members. Within a few weeks, our two teams presented some pretty cool projects at our final presentations over Zoom.
Our first-ever cohort!
Where We Are Now
Today, after three short years, we have grown to so much more. CodeLab became a software development and UX design organization, offering an opportunity for members to work on cross-functional teams. Our advanced teams work with real-world tech company clients, giving members a taste of industry work. And most important of all, we’ve built community. Between developing amazing projects, learning new skills through our curriculum, and growing professionally and socially at events, we’ve created a much greater sense of connectedness in the UC Davis tech community.
As of Spring 2023, CodeLab has built 32 projects, worked with 15 industry clients, and had 180 members and alumni across our 6 project terms. Learn more about the organization on our website. (Our website was also a project I designed and led the development team on!)
Being a part of CodeLab had an immense impact on my college experience and career journey. It’s impossible to share everything about my three years in CodeLab, but I’d like to highlight a few key initiatives, accomplishments, and experiences I had.
Winter/Spring 2021
Fall 2021
Winter/Spring 2022
Fall 2022
Winter/Spring 2023
A Little About Our Structure
We run two project terms a year, which are spans of 6 (our Fall term) or 15 (our Winter/Spring term) weeks where students build out a project. Students apply to join each term, so we get a brand new cohort of members twice a year. After hosting several recruitment events and parsing through hundreds of applications each cycle, our board members place students on teams based on their strengths and interests. Less experienced students are placed on “Spark” projects, which are low-stakes projects generally focused on addressing a pain point of the student community. More experienced students are placed on “Industry” teams, where they work with a real tech startup client for their projects.
Cross-Functional Teams
CodeLab started as a software development-only organization, but when taking on web and mobile projects, we quickly realized someone had to design the interfaces as well. We brought on designers—to which we had a rocky start. Initially, we had a single separate design team working with all the developer teams. We quickly realized this was the wrong way to do it, and we had designers directly integrated in teams soon after.
Since then, we’ve made a point to integrate design and development. The developers and designers of teams meet regularly to discuss the feasibility of design implementations and to offer feedback on the progress of both sides. We also host workshops where we have developers create wireframes on Figma while designers try their hand at front-end coding.
These initiatives have not only smoothened out the progression of the projects but also fostered empathy and appreciation in associates for the other field’s craft.
Associates ideating on features
Me with the CodeLab Website team I led in Fall 2021
Developing an In-House Curriculum
I never really saw educating students as CodeLab’s function. Instead, I see it as an organization that facilitates learning. Subtle, sure, but the board is composed of undergraduate students too. We aren’t experts in any technical domain, but we want to make it easy for associates to learn new things on their own.
That said, our education team over the years has gone above and beyond, creating a set of in-house technical articles, video tutorials, and quizzes. In their first week of the project term, associates go through our technical bootcamp in either software development or UX design. The articles and videos are rounded off by a bootcamp project, tying in all the concepts they learn. A handful of our bootcamp videos are available publicly on our YouTube channel.
Over time, the education team hopes to expand the curriculum to more technical topics and find more innovative ways of teaching. (In fact, we have an internal learning tool currently in development.)
Growing Professionally and Building Connections
Being a part of CodeLab is meant to help associates develop their skills and have a resume-worthy project, but that’s only one step toward landing a future job. Throughout the project term, we also host resume and portfolio reviews, guest speaker events, and mock interviews. To develop associates’ soft skills, we have team-building exercises and public speaking activities like our pitch competition.
We also host social events, completely detached from the technical work. We’ve had game nights, taken trips to Sacramento, and more. The socials cater to different needs: some associates want to network, others simply want to make new friends! Regardless, we’ve found that bringing associates closer together results in a more fun work environment and even greater outcomes from project teams.
Our scavenger hunt in Sacramento
Some associates and I playing mini golf
The winning egg tower team
Our Top Golf social
Fall 2022 Final Presentations
Billiards at the MU games area
Davis Triceratops team at our banquet
Ben and Justin, guest speakers from Netflix
Associates at our Blaze Pizza fundraiser
Teams scrambling during our Pitch Competition
Introducing a Business Mindset
In Fall of 2022, I sat in a general meeting and looked around the room. For the first time, things felt mostly stable. We had the largest volume of applications yet, ironed out many of the kinks in teams’ structures, and had a library of already-planned events we could reuse. But I love experimenting, so I wanted to introduce something new.
Towards the end of the prior academic year, we noticed a trend among current and former members: many joined for one term, some stayed for two (typically one term on a Spark project and one on an Industry project), but next to none stayed for more than that. UC Davis only has three or so prominent project-based tech clubs, so after getting involved in a couple of clubs for a term or two, many students asked “What’s next?”. It was clear there was a need for longer-term opportunities in such clubs.
And so, CodeLab Product was born. CodeLab Product is a new branch of the organization, offering opportunities to work on a project long-term alongside a product-thinking curriculum. (Spark and Industry projects, on the other hand, are now under the “CodeLab Accelerate” program umbrella.) Product associates are already experts in UX design or the relevant software stack, allowing them to broaden their understanding of a software product.
For the Winter/Spring 2023 term, CodeLab Product is but a pilot program. We have two teams of 5 students each building upon two former Spark projects. The first 6 weeks of the term was the “Discovery” phase, where teams were completely hands-off on the codebase. Instead, they spent the time doing a deep dive into their target market, conducting business experiments, and developing their product roadmap. In the latter 9 weeks of the term, teams rapidly developed their selected features, launched a beta version, and planned out their product marketing.
Whether to continue this program or not is in the hands of next year’s board. Regardless of if CodeLab Product sticks around, I hope this pilot helps inform the planning of the future associate experience.
Leading a Team
After serving two years as the Vice President of External, I became the President of CodeLab for the 2022-2023 academic year. And wow, leading a team was a challenge. Prior to moving into the position, I anticipated I would be focused on giving high-level direction on where to steer the organization. Instead, my biggest challenges this year were from handling people, not the organization. I found I needed to drive intrinsic motivation in the team, balance everyone’s interests, gain commitment to initiatives, and generally work to improve morale, among other things.
To read about the changes the organization saw in my year as president, read our Medium article.
Escape room social with the board
Deliberating on associate applications… until 3am
Thai food we waited an hour for
Reflections After Three Years
What a journey it’s been. CodeLab was undoubtedly one of the most significant experiences in college. A few highlights and takeaways:
- I met a lot of amazing people. The board members were the most motivated team I’ve ever been a part of, and I’m really glad to have forged new professional connections and close friendships.
- I explored career paths. I’m a computer science major, so software engineering is the obvious path to go. But through CodeLab, I’ve also had opportunities to explore UX design, graphic design, project management, product management, marketing, and more.
- I’ve learned strategies to build an enduring organization. Over time, I’ve learned the value of systems thinking. To be able to build upon the board’s previous work, we needed to create structures to systematize every part of the club. And further, we needed to test and iterate on every one of these systems. “Building systems” is a vague phrase, but this mindset helped us grow effectively.
- I’ve learned the role of a manager and a leader. My role as president wasn’t a directing and planning role, but a people and managing role. I had to ask myself a lot of questions about the team, like: How can we make members feel a stake in the organization? What are board members’ motivations? What problems might I not be seeing?
It’s definitely bittersweet parting with the organization, but I’ve learned a lot. I am thankful for everything CodeLab has offered me, and I’m eager to move on to my next adventure.
