Developer Spotlight – a COLAB2 Alumni Returning
Joining to build a cool product from scratch, Drew got more than what he expected from the Co.Lab experience!
Happy 🐫 Day!
Can you believe June’s over?! We’ve now reached the midway point of 2021 and Co.Lab’s hosting our fifth cohort since we first started last September.
A lot has changed with the Co.Lab program since its inception and none can speak to it more than Drew, a COLAB2 participant and a returnee in COLAB5! This week, we sat down and heard what he’s taken out of the experience.
Dhruvil (Drew) Patel is currently a software engineer at Clubhouse Software, a project management platform company based in New York City. Prior to Clubhouse, he was a software developer at Kira Systems which is a Toronto legal machine-learning startup.
Having been in software development for a few years now, Drew noticed a common trait of this role in the industry:
“A lot of software jobs deal with revisiting existing codes—optimizing it or adding to it and supporting existing systems. Yes, you’re building new stuff but most often, it’s not brand new applications or products. You rarely get to do something truly end-to-end. Someone else or another team usually does it and then passes it to you, and then you pass it to someone else. Unless you’re fortunate to be in an early stage of a company where things have not yet been built, you don’t write software from scratch.
For me, I want to build something from scratch, where I can be more creative. So if you really want to level up and say, ‘I can build something from nothing and have it out in the world and people are using it’, then something like Co.Lab is perfect for you. Very rarely will you get to do that in a company because you will most likely work on a small portion of that project.”
And that’s what pulled Drew to the Co.Lab program for the COLAB2 season: the chance to build something from scratch and get to be a part of that process from beginning to end. He wanted to network with new people and he wanted to build things that can make a real impact.
What Drew gained from the program was a lot more than he initially expected.