CodeLab 2022–2023 Year in Review

By Edward Chew, CodeLab 2022–2023 President

Last week, our 11 teams presented their projects at our Final Presentations, wrapping up our Winter/Spring 2023 term and our third year as an organization. Since we started in Fall 2020, CodeLab has grown immensely. This year, our 106 members completed 14 projects over 21 total weeks of agile design and development. Even with the growth, our mission has remained the same: propelling tech careers by bringing community and accessible project-based learning to UC Davis.

As our cohorts grew, so did our board. Our 18-person leadership team spent countless hours ideating, testing, and iterating on new initiatives to bring the organization to new heights.

Associates kicked off the year with Education’s revamped UX design and software development boot camps designed for interactive learning. Modules were summarized with quizzes, and the boot camp week was capped off with a small project to test associates’ newly learned skills. Later into the term, the Education team hosted office hours and design critique sessions to offer support throughout the projects’ progression.

Infrastructure, a new branch for this year, facilitated the deployment of projects and developed internal tools to streamline board processes, including an administrative dashboard to manage our website and member rosters.

Some of the biggest changes of the year were from Projects. This year, we explored a variety of fields with seven industry clients. The Optiwise team designed an automated product image generation interface, powered by DALL-E 2 and GPT-4. The Grata project was CodeLab’s first time exploring IoT, building an iOS app to control home smart locks.

For our Spark projects, we tested new project timelines. Three of our teams had year-long terms, allowing us to build projects at a larger scale. This included Davis Triceratops, a scavenger hunt mobile app for a student organization, and Training Tool, an internal learning platform for the future of CodeLab.

In January of 2023, we launched CodeLab Product, a big new program to bring business thinking to the design and development process. Product associates spent 6 weeks conducting business experiments, evaluating target markets, and crafting pitches to hone in on a meaningful set of software features. In the latter 9 weeks of the term, teams rapidly developed and tested their products.

But the CodeLab experience goes well beyond project building, thanks to our Operations team. Throughout the two terms, associates engaged in professional development workshops and bonded with other members at social events. There were too many to list them all here, but some highlights were running around the streets of Sacramento for a scavenger hunt and crafting goofy presentations at our pitch competition.

I’ve been part of CodeLab since the beginning when Essam, Omid, James, and I co-founded the organization. Three years later, the organization has seen explosive growth and huge improvements, thanks to the hard work of our amazing board members. This was a challenging position but has undoubtedly been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my college journey. Parting with the organization is bittersweet, but I know the organization is in good hands.

Caden Newton is CodeLab’s 2023–2024 president. Caden has been part of CodeLab for two years and has seen the organization's many changes, challenges, and opportunities, both from an associate’s and a board member’s perspective. I’ve seen Caden’s passion for CodeLab, and I am excited to see him take it to new heights.

It’s been an incredible year. Thank you to everyone who made it happen.

Signing off,
Edward