Early Pairing Tour
As part of the apprenticeship all resident apprentices get the chance to pair program with the software crafters on their review board. Generally the pairing tour is the two weeks prior to starting the challenges that dictate whether an apprentice becomes a crafter or not.
I’ve been lucky enough to get an extra week of pairing ~2/3 of the way through my apprenticeship, and this week has been one of my favourites of the apprenticeship so far.
At Makers Academy we pair programmed every day; I think because I did so much pairing at the start of my coding journey pairing is my preference to learn. 8th Light strongly values pairing, but unfortunately it isn’t feasible to do much of it during the apprenticeship as apprentices have individual challenges to get through and are on different timelines.
On Monday and Tuesday I paired with Rabea and Daniel, working in Ruby and React. It was really great pairing with these two, getting exposed to React for the first time, working on a client project and sitting in on their IPM.
I have been using Vim (without tmux) since I started my apprenticeship, and really thought I was using it effectively, but pairing with these two made me realise that I was nowhere near using Vim as powerfully as I could be. Today in waza I will be setting up tmux and playing VimGolf to improve my Vim skills.
On Wednesday I paired with Mollie on an Android app in Kotlin. She has some exposure to Android programming, and a little bit of Kotlin but this language is new to her too. It was really fun pairing on this, learning together and trying new things out.
We built a basic Dog Facts Quiz app that would show a fact about dogs and ask the user if it is true or false. The app shows a Toast notification telling the user if they are correct. The app also has a ‘cheat’ function, which would show the user the answer — if they took advantage of this, when they chose their solution it would tell them they shouldn’t cheat. Finally the user can press next to move on to the next fact.
This was a really fun day, and it was great to use IntelliJ again. Even though I’m an iPhone person, I think I prefer writing Android apps better than iOS apps.
I spent Thursday with Makis out at a client in their office. This was really cool, as I got to join him for stand up and a couple meetings with the clients. It was a great experience being out on site, as this is most likely what my job will be when I become a crafter.
During the apprenticeship 95% of the time is spent researching and writing code. On site it seems there is sometimes less coding, and more discussions and gathering information.
Makis and I wrote a parser that takes CSV files and recursively gets all of the headings of the different columns. This makes it easy to compare different spreadsheets. We built this in Elixir, a language I haven’t had exposure to. This morning Makis and I will pair again which I’m really looking forward to.
Overall I’ve had a really fun week, and I’m already looking forward to my next pairing tour at the end of my apprenticeship!
