A Year in Review 2020–2021
CodeLab is a software and design agency at UC Davis, working on impactful software projects with industry clients. It’s the first organization of its kind at UC Davis, and we really want to build a sense of community within the tech space at the university that didn’t previously exist.
How We Started
CodeLab was built on 3 core principles: Community, Education, and Professional Development. We were founded in the fall quarter of 2020 by Essam Sleiman, James Junaidi, Edward Chew, Omid Mogasemi, four aspiring CS majors entering their second year. We saw that some other major universities had project-based computer science organizations, but UC Davis did not. We took a leap and decided to start our own. Our mission was (and still is!) providing students with experience working on large-scale projects similar to that of the tech industry.
To learn more about the origins of CodeLab, check out this blog post.
The Pilot Cohort — The Fall 2020 Cohort
Our pilot cohort was the Fall of 2020, where we had one client, Ambii, and one mentored team, the CodeLab website team. We kept the organization closed and recruited members individually. Our mentored team built our first website with React, mentored by our now VP of Technology Omid. Our first client, Ambii, helped mentor our client team developers as they built them an internal UI in React. Of course, there were hiccups along the way and our organizational structure wasn’t perfect, but we had a very successful cohort! We were proud of the projects teams put together and we all knew CodeLab would grow into something amazing.
The Winter/Spring 2021 Cohort
As we entered into winter quarter, we decided to establish a longer 16-week cohort that spanned between the Winter and Spring quarters, so we could offer a more extensive boot camp and a more diverse offering of projects. We also wanted to make changes to our organizational structure and refine the development process.
The first step was expanding the executive team. We brought on Gennifer Hom as our VP of Design to lead a team of UI/UX designers to work with development teams on their projects. Behind every successful app, there is a team of brilliant designers. We also brought on Professor Joel Porquet as our faculty advisor, who we could come to as a resource for advice, connections, and feedback.
The next step was organizing the development structure to include a simplified version of the Agile methodology. We included weekly spring meetings and task boards in order to organize the development progress and clarify weekly tasks. We also brought in project managers who would run sprint meetings and organize development tasks.
With this, we were ready for our second cohort. We started with a comprehensive boot camp for the first two weeks, then got to work on the projects up until the last week of May.
If you’re interested in checking out any of the tutorial videos feel free to browse the CodeLab UC Davis YouTube account!
Our Projects
The core of CodeLab is in our projects. Through development processes similar to that of industry work, our teams create projects that will be used by real people.
Each of our teams consists of a Project Manager and several Designers and Developers. Designers work through the design process to research, ideate, and ultimately produce high fidelity wireframes that Developers later implement on the frontend. As design and development progress through the term, members are able to experience the interactions between different parts of a project within their cross-functional team.
Our Previous Work
Through our first year, we have completed 6 projects in total: 3 mentored projects and 3 client projects.
In our pilot cohort, Fall 2020, we worked with Ambii to build an internal UI that accesses their database and built the CodeLab website. Check out the blog posts here:
In the Winter/Spring 2021 cohort, we worked with RefocusAI and Family Proud as our client projects, and rebuilt the Hands Together’s site and developed AggieExplorer as our mentored projects. Check out their blog posts here:
Goals for the UC Davis Community
We hope CodeLab will have a meaningful impact on the UC Davis tech community for years to come. Inside and out of computer science, the tech industry offers incredible opportunities. We want CodeLab to help propel all students interested in tech into successful careers. And while CodeLab is the first of its kind, we hope we will help pave the way for more organizations like it.
What’s Coming Next: The 2021–2022 Year
There are quite a few changes to be made in the upcoming year. With Essam Sleiman, our founding President, leaving the organization James Junaidi has taken the role of President. The rest of the executive team includes Omid as the VP Technology, Edward as the VP External, and Gennifer as the VP Design. We are also bringing three new board members, Salma Hassen as our Operations Manager, and Minh-Tu Ngyuen and Abhay Thacker as our Project Coordinators!
We started this organization during the COVID-19 pandemic, so our organization has been only remote thus far. While the upcoming academic year will be largely in-person, we also need to consider the impacts of COVID-19 on the tech world. In short, remote work is here to stay. With the many organizational and videoconferencing tools that now exist, working virtually has become increasingly productive. As we plan the coming term, we will be exploring hybrid methods to provide members with the most meaningful CodeLab experience.
With the fully remote past year, we were generally very project-focused. As we move in person, we will be having more social events to give members opportunities to make new friends and really develop a tight-knit community.
Closing Thoughts
If you want to learn more about CodeLab, sign up for our mailing list to hear periodic announcements! Subscribe on our website.
We hope this post gives readers a better idea of what CodeLab is and what we really do, both for clients and our members. For any potential clients or members that want to be involved with CodeLab, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
