Teamwork really makes the dream work! - What I was able to learn from collaborating with a team

As we wrap up our final sprint for Lambda Labs, it has been a very fun journey, but not one that hasn’t seen its fair share of setbacks and challenges. I feel like however, embrace challenges as I believe overcoming challenges makes you stronger as a person.

Getting to work for a stakeholder who is involved in a non-profit in sheltering the homeless was really a eye-opening experience for me, considering that our product of a digital intake form would truly have an impact on a problem, which really tested my passion and skill in solving a problem and collaborating with a team who share the same end goal in finding the solution.

It's definitely motivated and pushed my work ethic knowing that this would impact the lives of people who check into Family Promises of Spokane, in easing the transition and process of a family's worst day of their lives, as well increase the efficiency for the staff members who worked there too.

Throughout planning with my teammates on user stories and roles for these applications, and designing wireframe and schemas for them as well, I truly believe the two weeks we've spent getting together and making plans was worth it. It definitely brought new ideas and challenges we didn't initially think of at first, and also increased our communication and trust within one another when giving input or feedback in the process.

The challenges we've encountered individually when working on a task really tested our trust and communication skills in reaching out and getting advice or feedback for overcoming them. It was definitely great to know we can count one another for help and accountability as well in our daily standup meetings. One example of a challenge we've faced was figuring out the database schema for the application. We didn't quite get that much clarification from the stakeholder considering that he wanted to see what we could come up with. There was a point in time where my team member Leslie and I were frustrated, and it wasn't until we reached out to another member on our team who gave us his take and advice which really was beneficial considering he had experience.

One of the bigger pieces I worked on was implementing a modal that displayed additional information for a guest when clicked on in the list of members. This was a feature that was intended for supervisors in order to be able to view demographics, barriers, and other factors such as whether or not they had a pet. This was a task that had many factors and obstacles to consider when implementing it, such as handling state and making the feature dynamic enough so that the information is accessible for each member and not result in errors being thrown.

What I originally intended to do at first was filtering the members by the id the matched the member that was clicked on to view their additional info.

function filterIt(id) {
const result = state.data.filter(item=> item.id = id)
setModal(result)
}

Eventually what I actually did after figuring out that the id of a member was in chronological order was simply just returning the index of the member inside on the on-click event of the button, which really made it so easier and efficient to render the information instead of fetching twice!

{
    icon: InfoIcon,
    tooltip: 'More Info',
    onClick: (event, rowData) => {
      setModal(state.data[rowData.id]);
       toggleModal(event);
               },

All in all, getting to collaborate with a team with the same interests towards a common goal of solving a problem that impacts people really made me become more ambitious and eager to work in the same setting again. Its amazing to know that you got a support system that could keep you accountable and also be resourceful when you need it the most! If you put trust in your team members and communicate effectively by either giving input or receiving feedback, the skies really the limit in what you can accomplish!