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.

Word Press has been successfully installed on the Object Mentor servers and ‘ButUncleBob.com’ should be available for blogging in a few days. So head on over there sometime soon and pick a fight with Bob Martin about some XP practice or other.

The install, as usual, was a bit of a problem until we realized that since PHP and MySQL were installed separately, we had to run a program to make them talk to each other. Said program was downloaded, installed, and then everything went smoothly. Nice.

Micah has now officially charged me with making a chess program to compete with his creation. Baby steps, Micah. First I gotta get it to let two humans play each other. After some discussion I’ve given up on my ‘special moves class’ because it’s way more of a maintenance nightmare then the problem it’s supposed to solve (letting ChessPieces know about the ChessBoard). I also want to finish my TDD version of Tic Tac Toe. The Land of Linux was fun to visit, but it’s good to be back writing some tests and makin’ ‘em pass.

Yeah, I kinda stayed away from Linux for awhile after that first experience. It’s all summed up here in a nice and cute sorta way but there was a few weeks there of coming in every day and feeling like my operating system was out to get me. I literally knew nothing about using ‘Nix OS so every problem was hampered by the fact that even the simplest of things (like using ps and grep to find out what was running, or the ‘which’ command, or where command paths were stored, etc.) was a herculean task in the face of my limited abilities.