I just finished the end of week two of my apprenticeship at thoughtbot and thus far it has been an amazing experience. I was really nervous about joining, since I absolutely loved my previous position at Spreedly and was really sad to leave my awesome team. However, I knew that I could learn a lot at thoughtbot and thus far this apprenticeship has definitely lived up to my expectations.

Already, in the two weeks that I’ve worked at thoughtbot I’ve released two small open source libraries! One in Elixir, called Brady, and one in Javascript, called Dummy. Check them out on Github!

Working at a consultancy has really changed how I think about open source libraries and explained why consultancies are often so active in creating new libraries. When you work at a product company you’ll just write the function and not pull it out, since you’ll only be using it in one, maybe two apps, even if it is something that you would want in every app you build. But when you’re a consultancy, you’re creating new apps all the time, so if it’s something you know you’ll need on 90% of new apps you build, it’s definitely worth the time to pull it out.

What I’ve been working on:

For the majority of my time the first week, I paired with my mentor, Draper, on the client project we’re currently working on. The project is an Elixir app, which is fantastic since I did a small Elixir project at Spreedly right before I left and have been wanting to learn more of it. It’s been great to get to pair so much, and I’ve learned a ton from being able to see how a more senior developer works. From being able to see his problem solving process to just seeing things like his workflow and what kind of tools he uses to be most efficient, it’s all very helpful.

The second week I spent working on my javascript skills. I did some javascript during the Iron Yard and have contributed significantly to the Ember side of a friends festival management application. However, I still lack a lot of the fundamentals of javascript. Initially, I was assigned to make a clone of one of our internal messaging tools in just vanilla javascript. I was able to connect to the API and get an initial index and show page out pretty quickly. I was pretty proud to be learning a programming language that was fairly new to me and getting so much done so quickly. From there, I went on and created the Dummy library.

As I said, thus far it’s been a great experience and I can’t wait to see what’s in store as I continue.