Your capstone presentation for BuildLab looks a little different from what you’re used to with other KWK programming.
You might remember your Demo Day presentations from camp where you focused on the product: showing off what you built, the features, the design. We love that format for our 13-18 programming!
But since we're all building similar products in BuildLab, traditional product demos could get repetitive fast. And because you as participants have shared with us that career connectedness important, we're going to do something different:
We're doing what we’re calling a “Project Defense” (a play on “thesis defense” and a term borrowed from other industries where students present a compiled portfolio of their academic work, projects, and learning journey to a panel of educators, peers, or community members to prove their readiness for graduation, college, or a career.)
In short, your Project Defense is a technical project walkthrough, the same format used in real engineering interviews. You'll do this in your standup groups with your facilitator.
🛡️ What is a Project Defense / Technical Screen / Project Walkthrough?
In many software engineering interviews, there's a round where you pull up a project you've already worked on and walk the interviewer through it. It's called a technical screen or project walkthrough.
Here's how it typically works:
- You share your screen and pull up a project you've built.
- You give a short overview: what it is, what you built, what tech you used.
- The interviewer asks you questions: "Why did you do it this way?" "Walk me through this function." "What was the hardest part?"
This is an important skill, and we want you to practice it in a safe space with your standup group before you ever have to do it in a real interview.
Curious about technical walkthroughs and how they show up in real interviews? Here are a couple articles worth checking out.
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đź“ŠÂ The Format
You’ll have ~5-7 minutes in total. Here's how your defense will go:
1. Give a 2-3 minute overview of your project:
- What is the Community Hub? (Yes, this might sound redundant since your teammates are building the same thing, and that's okay! We want to give you a chance to practice saying it in your own words and your teammates will benefit from hearing it said in a slightly different way)
- What tech does it use? (Again, we know this can be redundant given your teammates know, but the key here is to say it out loud, get comfortable with the vocabulary)
- What did you build specifically? (Focus on the code you wrote, the tickets you completed, the features you contributed.)
You may share your screen and provide a visual aid. This can be pulling up the Community Hub, your branch, your code, and/or slides.
2. Highlight 1-2 things you're proud of.
3. Your facilitator asks you one question. They'll pull from the question bank below. Think of them as a friendly interviewer. We don’t expect perfect answers, we want you to get the practice of thinking out loud about your code.
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🙋‍♀️ Question Bank
Here are the questions your facilitator might ask. If it makes you feel better to be prepared, take a look ahead of time!
About your code:
- Walk me through how [feature] works, from the user clicking something to the data showing up.
- Why did you build it this way? Were there other approaches you considered?
- What's happening in this file? Can you explain it line by line?
- What was the hardest part of this ticket? How did you work through it?
About your process:
- How did you use AI tools (like Codex) when building this? How did you decide what to keep vs. rewrite?
- Tell me about a time you got stuck during BuildLab. What did you do?
- How did you approach a ticket for a part of the codebase you hadn't touched before?
- If you had another week, what would you improve or add?
About the tech:
- What's the difference between a Server Component and a Client Component? Which did you use and why?
- How does data get from the database to the page the user sees?
- What does your database schema look like? How are the tables related?
- What happens when a user submits the form in your create feature?
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🤩 We’re looking forward to your Project Defenses!
One last thing: we hope you enjoy the process of preparing for your Project Defense. We anticipate the preparation taking 30-45 minutes. Revisit the code you contributed, pick 1–2 things you're proud of, and practice talking through your work. That's it. We don't want you stressing about this: we just want to give you practice doing something that will come up in real interviews, in a space where people are rooting for you.
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