Thread by @jlgelinas

I mentioned a few days ago that @LambdaSchool Build Weeks, which are monthly cross-functional collaborations on delivering a full stack project specification, are conceptually one of my favorite things about their instructional model. But does Lambda pull it off in practice?
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The secret ingredient in build weeks is that Lambda starts a new cohort every 4 weeks. So as you move through the 16 week core curriculum, you revisit build weeks and continuously level up in responsibility for different parts of the stack on your team.
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A significant part of what Lambda offers that helps accelerate and amplify your pace of learning (vis a vis freely available self study resources) are these structured, collaborative, teamwork progressions (cc: @ossia, @dan_abramov, @cherdotdev, others voicing concerns)
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But students planning, coding, and integrating an entire app from scratch is a tall order. It doesn’t go well every time. Bottom line up front, I had a 50% success rate over my 4 build weeks. Would love to hear other students’ success rates.
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Here’s the no-BS report card:
Build Week 1 - ❌ BetterReads - Nothing deployed
Build Week 2 - 🏠 Appraiser BFF- appraiserbff.xyz
Build Week 3 - 📅 Block Club Calendar - blockclubcalendar.now.sh
Build Week 4 - ❌ Block Club Calendar 2 - Nothing deployed
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Build Week 1, BetterReads, was probably the low point of Lambda for me. I felt it in my bones when I read it a few days ago, because I remember having *that* “I might have messed this one up” conversation with my partner after my first build week.

https://twitter.com/watsonwaswrite/status/1230904682077466626?s=20

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I’ll talk about BetterReads in depth in a bit, because it wasn’t just the developers that messed up here if you asked me. It was Lambda School as a system too.
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In contrast, Appraiser BFF is what sealed the Lambda deal for me, and I never second guessed my choice after that.
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If you go check Appraiser BFF ( appraiserbff.xyz ) out, open your console and look for this message before trying to signup 😂.
We didn’t integrate UI for server error handling, and the instance needs 20 seconds to spin up. 🤫
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On Appraiser BFF I LOVED watching everyone (frontend, backend, data science) bang their head against their personal boundaries and ultimately breakthrough. They key was teamwork. The team lead & experienced students broke from their own tasks to help the junior devs.
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Shout out to @BriannaKeune, @mikeguadalupe, @Vyraal1, and the rest of my Appraiser BFF fam.
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What I also loved about Appraiser BFF was that it was COOL and it WORKED. Most build week projects are CRUD apps with one extra layer of sophistication. Our “extra something” was a data science API that crunched tax assessment data to generate home appraisals. FAM IT WORKED.
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I can’t really overstate how over the moon I was about this at the time. I shared it with friends, family, and people I was running into at local developer meetups. I couldn’t believe I was accomplishing this after just 8 weeks.
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I also can’t overstate how comparatively mortified I am looking back at the app now in most ways. I think it was @Ryan_Holdaway who first told me “any code that wasn’t written by me in the last two weeks is garbage”
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But having a live project also leveled up the experience I was having at meetups— I’ve found developers love to help new people enter the career field, but it’s hard for them to connect with you unless you have specific projects and technical questions you can point too.
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@LambdaSchool gives you many experiences shipping software with a cross-functional team to talk about. Conversations with experienced developers become rich and textured. You can talk UI patterns, project management, API integrations, frameworks, all anchored in your work.
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Anyway I promised I’m not here just blow smoke up people’s bums, so lets talk about the strikeouts too.
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Build Week 4 - Block Club Calendar 2 - failed in the most basic way. When you’re collaborating on a full stack team, if one function fails to deliver… there is no app. One of the frontend guys ended up figuring out midweek he was in over his head and needed to flex.
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This is a feature, not a bug— “flexing” is repeating just a single unit in the core curriculum to reinforce your mastery. But yeah, there was no app. My backend is documented here: [github.com/bw-block-club-…] if you want to take a look.
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This is why students are graded pass/fail on their individual work during build weeks. Actually integrating and deploying as a team is “exceeding expectations.” Labs (8 weeks of product development) is where Lambda actually nails down your ability to ship on a team.
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Build Week 1 - BetterReads - was something else. The team leader for that project was unprepared to guide the team through the collaboration process, didn’t understand Build Week expectations, gave bad info to students, and struggled to offer value beyond hosting standup.
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I was insulated from most of the damage since during Build Week 1, my task was to make a standalone mobile responsive marketing page. It’s the students in Unit 2 / Unit 3 / Unit 4 who are all collaborating on the full stack app.
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I saw the BetterReads dev team talk in circles, for days, about who was going to do what / supposed to do what without any real clarity or resolution. By the end, everyone was just trying to pass individually so they didn’t have to “flex” (repeat the unit). It got weird.
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You could spin this as “lessons in the importance of teamwork,” but that would be bullshit. It was a failure of a paid Lambda representative to communicate expectations and coach folks to success. At the time, y only question was “is this a local failure or a global failure?”
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So why did I stick it out? I was super impressed by what the other students KNEW. Even though they failed / the system failed, hearing them talk about state containers, endpoints, data access, etc, made me want to keep going so I could learn what they knew.
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The other reason I stuck it out is that there is a large surface area for submitting feedback @LambdaSchool. I filled out the forms and slack messaged everyone and their uncle on Lambda staff about what I felt had gone wrong.
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My wife ended up encouraging me to stick it out too. She knew I had been talking about doing software after the Army for years, and had heard how geeked out I was during the first few weeks of school. I took the risk, and my Build Weeks got a lot better.
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I don’t know if that’s because I got better, Lambda got better, Build Weeks got better, or all of the above.
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When my team failed to ship in Week 4 it didn’t feel that bad. Lambda communicates clearly that Build Weeks exist to demonstrate individual mastery, because a week is too short to fix every problem that might come up.
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In closing, I don’t think it’s just the team leader that failed the group on my first build week, I personally think Lambda School failed that Team Leader too. There’s a lot of back-and-forth anecdotes about “do team leaders get hired on Friday and start on Monday?”
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I’m not a team leader, so I don’t know Lambda’s actual policy. Here’s what I’ve experienced as a student: Team Leader training happens during build weeks. My friends who have been hired usually find out at the end of week 3, and spend that 4th week doing their training.
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So if a newly hired Team Leader is also given a build week team to supervise and tagged as a project manager… then yes, they got hired on Friday and started on Monday, while also in training for their new job.
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I don’t know how often that happens anymore, but Lambda is pretty responsive to feedback so there's even odds. But I don’t think it was fair to the Team Leader to be thrust into that role on day 1. I’m sure with a little more guidance they went on to do great things.
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It might be two or three days, but next time I’ll talk more about how I think Team Leaders were a huge PLUS for my student experience, and dispel some of the “bUt YoU aRe PaYing FoR StuDenTs tO TeAcH U” hysteria
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In the meantime, you can hear an amazing Team Leader talk about her own experience, in her own incredibly eloquent words, right here:

https://twitter.com/codeFreedomRitr/status/1231210035667185664?s=20

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