Jake Scruggs

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 mentorsRails’ Asset PipelineThe 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.…

The views and opinions expressed here are my own and don’t necessarily represent positions, strategies, or opinions of Backstop Solutions Group.

Recently we released episode 3 of the Software Apprenticeship Podcast but had to pull it back for re-editing because of some problems with how developers talk to each other.  Developers are not kind to ANY code.  Even our own.  Especially our own.  Sitting next to a dev while he or she discusses the code they are working on can be a shocking experience.  Words like “Crap,” “Junk”, “Garbage” and many worse are used often.  A lot of this type of talk was on episode 3 and when someone at Backstop (who’s job it is to protect us from ourselves and comments taken out of context) heard it they asked us to edit the podcast to take out some of the more offensive comments. This is why episode 3 sometimes fades into music and then comes back mid-conversation.  Sorry about that.

I don’t know where I first heard the definition of developer as “Whiny Optimis…