Participating in The Collab Lab: Wrapping up
Tags: webdev, beginners, thecollablab, frontend
Published: 2024-04-09 18:17:18

This is the last entry of my [Collab Lab’s participation series](https://dev.to/vivitt/series/26359). During the last week my team successfully shipped the fully functional web app that we have been working on since February.
As a wrap up I want to share some final thoughts on my experience being part of [The Collab Lab](https://the-collab-lab.codes/).

### Our final app is live 🚀
We spent the past weeks working on making the user interface of our app look professional and welcoming, and I collected the [most relevant parts of these weeks in another blog post](https://dev.to/vivitt/participating-in-the-collab-lab-week-8-9-2aci).

After this process, our app is fully functional and looks great. You can [see it live here](https://tcl-71-smart-shopping-list.web.app/).
You can also watch the [recording of the 2024 first cohort demo](https://cdn.zappy.app/c4fb07e5fb336cbd34543e7220db3755.mp4), where each team showcased their app to the rest of the participants. Ours starts around minute 8, but I find it super cool seeing how each team comes to a very different result with the same prompts.

### Presenting Despiensa
**Despiensa** is a wordplay on the Spanish words _despensa_ and _piensa_.

It's a React, Tailwind & Firebase web app that allows users to register and create shopping lists, which they can also share with other users. The app also records the user's buying habits, so it displays the list items ordered by their likely next purchase date.

Here are some views of our app. When users arrive, they are prompted to register using Google:

![Despiensa’s landing page](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nt05c5tz0mmdhycaw4pt.png)


Then they can start creating a list or navigating to the one they want to use:

![Despiensa’s All my lists view, without any list.](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/z5n4yx25551u2o8w0kc2.png)

![Despiensa’s All my lists view, with two lists.](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/5e5fdut9axayiliu4f1o.png)

Once in the list page, users can interact with the items in the list and filter them using the input at the top:


![List view, filter input is empty and all list items are shown](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9r275icw60re25tih493.png)

![List view, filter input contains the text "ch" and only matching items are shown](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hqfdokamm8acpl4cvtp5.png)

Finally, in the manage list page, users can add new items to their list or share the list with other users:


![Manage List view, displaying a form to add items and another one to share the list.](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/3da59kixpngrt5wj8i2x.png)


We still want to add a few more nice-to-have features such as [adding a dark mode](https://github.com/the-collab-lab/tcl-71-smart-shopping-list/issues), and we plan to work on those during the next few weeks.

## My personal wins during the program
Now looking back, what I value most is that joining The Collab Lab helped me build confidence in my work and also in explaining and showcasing it to others.

I consistently wrote about the issues I worked on and kept this series active by publishing our progress almost weekly. 

Also, I returned to the React mental model. After spending some months focused on Vue.js, it was really great to come back to working with React and be able to gain deeper understanding of core concepts.

## Wrapping up The Collab Lab experience
❤️ Most of all, The Collab Lab is a great experience to connect with amazing people.

💫 I am really grateful with the entire team, volunteers, and mentors. Their commitment with the project made the whole experience really enjoyable and contributed to creating a safe space to learn and grow.

🙌🏽 I also want to thank the rest of the team members: [Borja](https://github.com/borjaMarti), [Celine](https://github.com/ocsiddisco), and [Judith](https://github.com/BikeMouse). The collaboration with them was great, and we learned a lot together.

🌱 I am glad I participated in this cohort, and I strongly recommend the experience to any early-stage career developers out there.

Thanks for reading :)