Week 8 at 8th Light

Week 8, 17 Oct 2011

So this week was another pairing week. I spent the first two days with Eric out at the Libertyville office. We fixed a bug, added tests to some code that was untested, and found a really nice SQL solution for a scope chain that was problematic.

On Wednesday, I paired with Craig, we were at the 8th Light Chicago office, and our clients were working with us on site. We were able to add a feature dealing with emailing users.

Wednesday evening, I went to the drinkup hosted by Braintree. Had a great time there, met lots of cool people

Thursday I went out to Libertyville again and paired with Micah. He bought me breakfast and we chatted about Ruby and the mysteries of life. Then we worked on replacing Limelight's dependency on an untested third party lib for working with 9patch images. Micah and I have very different development styles, he likes to figure out how to do the task in the method he's written to do it, then extract things out of there. I like to assume some other method or object will do everything I need and delegate to objects and methods that don't exist. Micah calls this "premature refactoring" I think of it as top-down design. I like it because if you do it correctly, you don't have to mix levels of abstraction together.

Friday I paired with Jim, we didn't have anything specific to work on, since he's about to join a different client team, so I gave a bunch of ideas, and we ended up working on Fuckery, a gem that will help sandbox and manage those times when you just want to fuck around with an idea for a bit. Right now it's still pretty bare, all it really does is creates folders in the sandbox, list them, and delete them. I'll probably add more functionality in upcoming Wazas (Waza is basically our version of Google's 20% time).

On Friday, Doug gave me my challenges. This is the last thing I will have to do here at 8th Light before I'm accepted as a Craftsman. I'm really excited to work on them, but I can't talk much, challenges are a right of passage so I had to swear a blood oath to keep the details secret.

Without going into detail, I can tell you that there's 27 of them, that I'm learning IO to facilitate at least one of the challenges. I've also started a weight lifting regimen for the physical exertion challenge. Here at 8th Light we take a holistic approach, a craftsman's body is as much a tool as their mind. It's rough, but I've got protein supplements and I'm working out every day.

I'm partway through the scavenger hunt. On Saturday I was able to trade for the gold tooth in Hyde Park, but I have no idea where I'm going to get the Spanish Dubloon. Maybe it's one of those challenges that you can't complete until you learn about the city of Chicago. Like maybe there's a spanish/pirate themed riverboat casino where they give out "gold" dubloons or something. IDK, I'll have to look around and do more research.

See you next week.