My Apprenticeship - Wednesday, August 18, 2004

This summer I'm revisiting my short apprenticeship at Object Mentor. I'll be posting commentary on all my posts from the summer of 2004 exactly 5 years later to the day.

This is the last post of the series.

Wednesday 8-18-04

Last day of XPAU and I'm pretty burnt. I'm typing this from the airport in Calgary where they inform me that they are running an hour behind. This is bad because my connecting flight in Las Vegas is an hour and 20 minutes after I land. So I'll have 20 minutes to catch my flight, assuming they can keep to their prediction. I don't have high hopes. I might have to miss work tomorrow.

Which would kinda suck because I need to figure out what's going on this year. With Rylander and Miller gone, I'm going to need some time to plan with the new guys.

Today I slept in and skipped the morning stuff. Then I hung out in the FitFest room, writing code, and chatting with Micah, David, and Paul. Ken stopped by later and we said our goodbyes. I hope I see him sometime soon. The last address was on the history of the waterfall and agile. The presenter did a good job showing how the originator of waterfall was actually arguing against waterfall and for iterative development. And how iterative development actually has been going for 30-40 years. But it has been marginalized and contained. The hope is that the Agile movement can kill the waterfall once and for all. But, who knows, 40 years from now we might be just another slide in a presentation.

Me and the OM crew went out for one last bite after the conference wrapped. Hard to say goodbye to those guys. Paul and David live in the city so there's a chance I'll still see them, but Micah's way, way out in the 'burbs so that'll be tough. Nothing a little effort can't overcome.

Is this my last entry? It just might be, the apprenticeship is over. Thanks for reading.

I was pretty exhausted and down when I wrote those words. Setting up for a year of teaching takes a lot of work and I had done nothing. I was facing no sleep followed by a mad scramble to get ready for new students.

So what did happen? At this point I had already turned in my code submission to ThoughtWorks and when they didn't get back to me after a few weeks I thought it was all over. What I didn't know is that ThoughtWorks is known in the field for having a very long interview process. I had already talked to 2 different people and submitted code so I thought they had enough to make a decision. Sometime near the middle of September they called me in for a day of tests and interviewing. I got job a week or so after that and started in early October. Which meant that I had to leave school with the year just started, but my high school was cool about it and didn't fine me or suspend my license (which they had the legal right to do).

I guess I could spend some time wishing I had continued this blog while working at ThoughtWorks, but instead I'm just going to be pleased that I managed to document so much of an important time in my life. There were days when I didn't really feel like blogging after a day of getting my brain crushed by code but I'm glad I stuck with it as long as I did.

I still see Micah, David, and Paul fairly often, btw.

Comments

Neil Edwards said…
Thanks Jake, I've really enjoyed reading these. Glad to hear you're all still in touch.

I wish I had the self motivation to keep a blog/diary like that!

Thanks again.
August 19, 2009 at 5:39 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's a Good Flog Score?

I've been using Flog to measure the complexity of my Ruby code and I was wondering how others interpret Flog numbers. I'll go first with my opinions: Score of Means 0-10 Awesome 11-20 Good enough 21-40 Might need refactoring 41-60 Possible to justify 61-100 Danger 100-200 Whoop, whoop, whoop 200 + Someone please think of the children (note: these are scores for an individual method) The 20 - 60 range is interesting to me. Sometimes the complexity of what you're doing will justify the score and other times the method is in desperate need of refactoring. The highest Flog score I've seen in the wild was in the 300's. What's you're personal high and what do you think of my rankings? In other news, I've redesigned the look of my blog so if you only see my post through a reader you might want to stop on by, take a look, and tell me what you think.
Read more

SICP Wasn’t Written for You

The number of software luminaries who sing the praises of “ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ” (referred to as SICP) is such a long list that you might think only a crazy person would take issue with it. However, to ignore SICP’s problems and continue to blindly recommend it seems just as crazy. SICP was the textbook for MIT’s introductory programming class and was a bit of a departure from other into to computer science textbooks at the time.  Wikipedia sums it up nicely:  “Before SICP, the introductory courses were almost always filled with learning the details of some programming language, while SICP focuses on finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern.”  Which sounds awesome, but does essentially say that abstract principles will be introduced before the nuts and bolts of a language.  If you think about that for a minute, you may see where the problems will be. When I was training to be a teacher I took a b
Read more

Point Inside a Polygon in Ruby

Recently my team needed to find out if a point was inside a given polygon and, as usual, we found some code on the internet that did what we wanted. And, as usual, there wasn't much explanation as to what it was doing. Here's the code (after we converted it to Ruby): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 def contains_point? (point) c = false i = -1 j = self .size - 1 while (i += 1 ) < self .size if (( self [i].y <= point.y && point.y < self [j].y) || ( self [j].y <= point.y && point.y < self [i].y)) if (point.x < ( self [j].x - self [i].x) * (point.y - self [i].y) / ( self [j].y - self [i].y) + self [i].x) c = !c end end j = i end return c end end So, you know, it works and I'm grateful to somebody for posting it but we had no idea how it works. So we wrapped 2 tests around it (one where the point is not in the polygon and another where it is
Read more