New awareness from my @_collab_lab experience: Learning is still happening when I’m doing something new that I’m not able to fully understand or recall. I followed a @freeCodeCamp tutorial to make a social app with React, Redux, and Firebase functions some months back.

It was a 12-hour video course on YouTube and I was determined to finish it. I did, but I didn’t feel like I left with a solid understanding of any of the new topics. Here’s how what I learned in that course applied to my Collab Lab experience:

When our query wasn’t returning because an index needed to be created, I had seen that problem before and by googling and finding the solution on stackoverflow, I recalled it. Because we were using a third party component, I don’t think the error showed up in the console

We just got an empty list. If I hadn’t encountered that exact problem, I don’t know that I would have found a resolution quickly. As another example, in my coding school I started learning react with hooks and left before we got to redux.

The concept of keeping state that is accessible to the whole app is what I learned from using Redux in the social app. That project didn’t use hooks at all. In the current project, we’re using all functional components and hooks.

I had heard that the useContext hook is used as an alternative to Redux. So having exposure to Redux meant I was aware of why global state is useful. It gave me a good place to start looking for a solution using hooks.

All of this is to say that even though at the time it felt like I didn’t “learn anything,” I totally did. Seeing something even once is helpful for the next time you come across a similar situation.

For me, going through the motions of typing out the code, not copy/pasting it, and trying to understand the concepts in a language agnostic manner is helpful when I’m learning something new in programming.

It takes some faith and self-awareness. I know that even if it feels wobbly and like nothing is sinking in, I’m learning by doing. I’m building a library of knowledge that I’ll be able to reference later. I also don’t put pressure on myself to remember anything

Googling isn’t cheating. Taking notes and looking back at them isn’t cheating. Spaced repetition works for me. I don’t have to KNOW IT know it the first time. I knew this before collab lab, actually. I knew how learning works for me

What is new here is working on a team with a completely fresh codebase. We are given user stories to satisfy, we aren’t told how to do it or given code that just needs a fill in the blanks.

So going through the motions of creating branches and pull requests at my coding school was valuable in the same way that my YouTube course was valuable. It’s not scary to make a branch or create a PR

I’m glad I came in comfortable with that part because it made a good base for learning to write good commit messages and documentation on PRs. The collab lab gives me context and reason for wanting to do that. I have to be able to communicate with my team about the code I write

I just remembered (don’t know how I forgot) that we did have projects from scratch in build weeks. I always had high hopes for those but they didn’t work well and there wasn’t the support available from working engineers that we have in the collab lab.

Remote collaboration is a learned skill and I love that I don’t get that chaotic, anxious, sink or swim feeling with my work on this team. I love that there’s guidance and lots of time to practice this. I’m here to learn and make mistakes in this low stakes environment.

h/t to @segdeha and the mentors for creating a working environment that feels psychologically-safe and supportive.