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.

Things got much better today. Much to my embarrassment, I drove the keyboard for a few hours. I’m slow, I can’t type very well, I don’t know IntelliJ (the slick Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that Object Mentor uses for writing Java code), but I banged out a few tests and made ‘em pass. The problem we were having is that you can attach files to wiki pages in the Old OMwiki. But in the new, FitNesse-centric, wiki we want to put all the files in one area and have links on the pages. This is mostly just a matter of changing the file structure, but it does have the added advantage of being able to link to files from more than one wiki page (well, you could probably do that in the old wiki, but solution would be inelegant). So we wrote a program that checks the folder (of the wiki page) for files and then creates a link to them at the bottom of the page. And it worked.

Mostly.

Some of the files had spaces in them which made our wiki widgets quit while only part of the way through the file name. But, in the plus column, we were able to completely transfer over all the wiki pages and have them look pretty much the same. Right now Paul and I are working on a program to grab all the filenames with spaces in them and cut out the spaces.

The eighties music was off today (which is good because I was getting a little tired of ‘Tainted Love’) , and Paul played some Beatles on his desktop-sized laptop.

“The eighties music was off today” – huh? I don’t remember this at all. Were the Object Mentors crazed 80s fanatics?

I’m still scared about pairing with people I don’t know, oddly enough. I’ve been doing this pairing thing for 5 years now and yet I still get wound up at the prospect of sharing a computer with another programmer – what if they’re better than me and I feel bad? Almost 100% of the time my fear is completely unfounded and I end up having a great time and learning a bunch. The only time I really hated it is when I let the other person type too much – then I just feel like a loser. No matter what the skill difference, each pair should spend about the same amount of time driving.