The Art of Managing a Team (from an 18 y/o)

My experience as a fellow in the MLH Fellowship (while leading a project)

A quick recap…

I’ve spent the last 12 weeks participating in the MLH Fellowship, contributing to open-source projects like Babel, SheetJS, and Docsify alongside 10 other student developers. I mainly contributed to Babel Core (the compiler package that 7M+ people use every day) and SheetJS (Excel/Word-like functionalities in JavaScript).

I spent the first 2 months mainly working on low-level concepts like Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) bugs for Babel, and binaries/scripting for js-word- a greenfield project in SheetJS.

After familiarizing myself with the codebase and submitting several Pull Requests (PRs) to both projects (some noticeable ones here and here), I wanted exposure leading to a more technical project.

Specifically, I wanted to understand what it’s like to coordinate with others and manage group responsibilities. The reason for this is because getting to experience both the technical and management sides as a developer allowed me to better understand the problem AND the product that I’m trying to solve and deliver.

It made me think more about the code I wrote, the architecture of the platform, and the User Experience that I wanted to deliver (more…