Guidelines

Communication

Please use your dedicated project team Slack channel (cXX-final-project-group-Y) for all cross-team communication. Please do not create a separate private groups (in Slack, WhatsApp, Signal etc…) for the team. The mentors and the HackYourFuture team would like to be involved as well. This will help us to detect early issues and step in to help out. You may still have 1 on 1 private chats for communication which is very specific for your collaboration with the other peer.

Daily standups

You are required to join and participate in the daily standups every working day (Monday - Friday). The daily standups are important to make sure the team is in sync and see if there are any issues needed to resolved. Try to keep the daily standups short (15min-30mins) and have a separate meetings for deeper topics.

For example, avoid going deep into the Backend API design as it may not be relevant to the Data team. Have a separate meeting for this and invite only those who are needed to be there.

Monday sessions

Participation in the weekly sessions with the product manager is mandatory. Please join on time, with your camera on. If you can’t attend the sessions, please inform your team and the HackYourFuture team in advance.

Work hours and days

We understand that everyone has their own schedules and commitments. Having a healthy working schedule is important for your mental well-being during the final project. Avoid overworking yourself - ask for help if you can’t make the tasks on time. Just like in a real job, we recommend working during the day (e.g 9:00 to 17:00) with breaks.

Weekends

You are not expected to work on a weekend (Saturday & Sunday). Please do not expect others to be available during the weekend. We recommend having two days with no coding or project related work. Don’t forget that this project is long and you don’t want to burnout by overworking. Weekends shall be at least no meeting time.

AI Guidelines

Use AI as a senior developer mentor, not as a team member.

This means:

Ask AI to explain concepts you don't understand, suggest approaches to a problem, or review your code for issues.
Don't ask AI to write features for you. If you paste a requirement and copy-paste the output, you are skipping the learning.

In addition:

If AI helped you solve a tricky problem, mention it in your PR description. This is normal and professional - hiding it is not.
Be prepared to explain the decisions your team made and how the main parts of your application work during the interview..