Week 7 at 8th Light

Week 7, 10 Oct 2011

Starting this on the train to Champaign for The ACM's conference.

Had a pretty good week. I've started my pair programming tour, meeting with Eric on Monday. We worked on some SQL and a rake task. Solving the kinds of problems that big companies like our client have. Afterwards, hung out with some people for dinner and Rock Band.

On Tuesday, I paired with Steve at another client's. I really enjoyed this, we worked on how to resume completion of a form that was only partially filled in. Given that the project was young enough to not yet need session based authentication, we were posed with the question of whether we should implement this kind of login behaviour first, or complete the current feature by simply re-rendering the form after asking for a simple username/password verification. I went for the latter as it allows us to complete the feature immediately, without requiring much code.

On Wednesday, I paired with Skim and my mentor, Doug on site at a client's office. I had to sign a super strict confidentiality agreement, so I'll omit everything else.

On Thursday, I paired with Paul, which is "much more than coding". We went to two iteration meetings, did a little bit of coding on an in house project, talked to another client about where they wanted to go with the future of their application, and finished it off by tiding up some links on the 8th Light blog.

Friday, I paired with Colin, hunting down a curious bug in a Rails application. Then we had 8th Light University where Billy talked about writing expressive HTML.

Picking the blog up on Monday night, I had a great time at the conference. The talks were really amazing, Khan Academy is so inspiring to me, and so was Maddog's talk. I love people who do something about the problems they see. I also enjoyed the talk on designing good API's, gave me some things to think about. The biggest difference between that talk and how I think was the documentation. I wanted to talk to Josh Bloch further about it but he was perpetually in conversation.

Got to see my friends from WSU's ACM, and on the train home, saw some people I'd met at the conference. They're part of Cleveland's ACM, I took them to the Haymarket Pub during the layover. If you go there, get the sweet-potato tots, they're amazing!

All in all, had a great week