Adalab Meets StyleSage

Last month, we had an amazing team of five female developers from Adalab create a brand new front-end for our User Analytics Platform. And we learned a lot from the experience.

Adalab is a developer's bootcamp particularly focused on women who have no prior technology experience. Coming from very diverse backgrounds (educators, social workers, waiters) they go through a very intense 13-week program where they learn about front-end development: HTML, CSS, Javascript, React, and git.

At StyleSage, merchants and buyers from fashion brands and retailers better understand the state of their markets and competition by navigating our online analytics platform - they browse charts, adjust filters, drill down to see product details and export reports. For us it's vital to understand how users actually use all features we provide: Do they use mostly a few charts and ignore the others? Do they export data a lot? Which kinds of reports are the most useful for them? How often do they log in into our platform?

During the course of just two weeks, the team which included Samanta Noblea, Carolina Céspedes, Beatriz Gómez, Sandra Fernández, and Pau Rodríguez, ran through three sprints to understand, develop, and deploy a new front-end for our User Analytics platform. They worked hard to create a React-based web app that helped us show all the user metrics we are collecting. For them, it was the first real-world development project they worked on: understanding requirements, splitting tasks, refactoring, and solving git merge conflicts. Lot's of first times and even more learnings. And for us, it was also very eye-opening to see how motivation and attitude play a big role (bigger than pure technical skills many times) into a successful team effort.

At the end of the two weeks there was a "demo day" where all eight teams presented their final projects (each with a different company), and it was amazing to see the great quality and variety of projects presented.

We're looking forward to future collaborations with Adalab and all that we have to learn and exchange in the process!