Episode 4 “Time to Exercise!” is out right now! Search for it on your favorite podcast app or check out our free temp website here: http://softwareapprenticeship.libsyn.com
With 4 weeks under his belt (plus 9 weeks of Dev Bootcamp) our apprentice, Jonathan Howden, continues his quest to become an enterprise software developer at an amazingly rapid pace. Can a dedicated man become a good developer without a college degree? Tune in and find out (spoiler: he’s doing well but it’s intense)
Topics this week:
- Doing push-ups to break up the lethargy of coding
- Migrating from Authlogic to Devise/Warden and the perils of using a framework’s column in the database for activation.
- Why senior programmers avoid becoming mentors
- Rails’ Asset Pipeline
- The usual screwing around and one censored F-bomb (sorry - it was me).
Yesterday we all sat in a room and reviewed Jon’s chess code (his outside of work coding project). I’ll try to put up a more detailed article about it soon, but in brief it went well. It’s fun to watch a junior developer try to encode all the crazy logic of chess while keeping the code clean, tested, and understandable. Other than making the classic mistake of mocking/stubbing the very object he was testing, Jon has some pretty readable code that will “mostly” let 2 people play chess against each other.
Episode 5’s in the can (on the SSD?) and we’re recording episode 6 later today with Dave Hoover, co-founder of Dev Bootcamp. Jonathan attended Chicago’s DBC in September of 2013 so Dave will get to check in with how Jon is doing in the “wild.” Also, Dave and I worked at both ThoughtWorks and Obtiva together so it should be quite an interesting conversation.
I really wanted this to be a weekly podcast but here we are at the end of the 9th week and only recording our 6th ep. Now that we’ve been through the recording and editing process a few times it should be easier to stick to a weekly schedule. Even if we weren’t recording the conversation I would still have a weekly wrap up with members of the team and the apprentice — it is a very nice way to sum up the week and lessons learned. It’s sort of a weekly, recorded, low stakes retrospective.
The views and opinions expressed here are my own and don’t necessarily represent positions, strategies, or opinions of Backstop Solutions Group.