Apprenticeship, Day 1

I've had the great fortune of being accepted into a Resident Apprenticeship with Colin Jones at 8th Light. I'm very grateful and excited to be exploring this one-of-a-kind opportunity to learn the craft of quality software development.

Today was the first day of a five-month-long adventure, give or take. Following the requisite paperwork and initiation, I sat with Colin to discuss some of our initial goals and some associated details. Among the first tasks to undertake is the construction of this blog, which is driven by the jekyll framework on github. It's an interesting departure from the dynamically-generated pages of ordinary blogs and CMSs. Once all content is generated, everything is rendered as a series of static pages. While it may result in a larger footprint with file size, performance is surely faster than dynamic alternatives.

Reading Material

I will be starting into some relevant reading with "Extreme Programming Explained" by Kent Beck. The intention is to get a fair idea of the development process used at 8th Light. After that, I will be becoming accustomed to Ruby on Rails, as this is among the preferred languages of my new company as well as the world at large. The book "Ruby for Rails" by David A. Black was recommended to me by Colin, being among those used while he learned Ruby.

First Assignment

Once I am comfortable and confident to proceed, as I'm sure will happen swiftly, my first assignment will be to create another version of unbeatable Tic Tac Toe. Having done so with Java on Android, I don't predict any major difficulties. The challenge will be to do this with a new language: Ruby. I look forward to the learning!