In the summer of 2009 I revisited my 2004 summer apprenticeship at Object Mentor. What follows is the original 2004 post and then some 2009 commentary.
Long bike ride in the rain this morning. Only got scary when those 16 wheelers zoomed by throwing a few gallons of water at me and my wiener bike. Micah was teaching the C# class today and lots of it was familiar b/c Java and C# are pretty darn similar, but it was cool to review TDD best practices while working with someone who didn’t know about ‘em. I was paired up with one of the paying customers (‘Tony’) and we managed to figure out M.S. Visual Studio. It’s kinda like FrontPage in that it tries to force you to do things the Microsoft way. The refactoring tools are pretty crappy – no extract method option (which is my new favorite thing)! So Tony and I had to do our own refactoring which was a good exercise. C# does have a cool decimal class which gives you arbitrary precision up to 26 places. This is very cool for money programs, because, as we all know, that guy (Richard Pryor) in that Superman movie used the rounding errors to steal money from banks and we can’t have that. Anyway, I feel like C# isn’t going to be to hard a transition, but it should be said that today was only the beginning.
I was sleepy all day today because we had this late-night cast party at my pad this weekend. Laura’s cast came over and brought their friends. All in all it was about 25 people. I’m glad my landlord (who lives below me) wasn’t home because there was lots of loud music and dancing. Right in the middle of Micah’s lecture he looked over at me and caught me in this huge yawn – for the record it was the sleep deprivation and not the class.
In Tic Tac Toe news: My program is now passing 11 out of 11 tests! And the methods tested include minimax and makeTheComputerMove. Now all I gotta do is figure out how to test the human interface. Hmmm.
Yeah that bike ride was kind of a harrowing adventure each morning. The only road that went directly to Object Mentor was a four laner that got lots of traffic. Could be pretty scary.