Obtiva Apprenticeship: Finish
10 May 2010I'll be the first to admit that I've been pretty terrible at keeping this blog up to date, but despite that, my formal apprenticeship is officially over.
It's been a really fun, and exhausting six months. I've had the opportunity to work, and live, with a lot of really smart, awesome people. People like Ryan Briones (who I owe a lot of the success of my apprenticeship to), Joe Banks, Chad Pry and Dave Hoover all made a tremendous impact on my experience as an apprentice. Obtiva does a really good job of providing their apprentices with everything they need to be successful, surrounding them with excellent people is no exception.
I managed to accomplish quite a bit too. I developed and launched a beta of my first rails app, became way more involved with the community, will be published in Rails Magazine, worked on client projects like Madmimi and Eventwax, committed to RSpec, released some open source projects of my own, and started a user group.
To wrap up the apprenticeship, I had my final milestone on the 27th of April. It started with an overview of Ignitious, looking at the interface, talking about the features, and what I plan to do with it in the future. From there we took a look at the code, the good and the bad. We spent some time looking at the tests, and where I need to refactor some ugly code.
After that I gave a presentation on an overview of things that I've learned while developing Rails applications (and some things that I've re-learned). Going into the milestone, I wasn't too happy with the presentation, but it went a lot better than expected. I'll be taking the feedback I got on it, and giving it again at a future Geekfest, and maybe at a local user group as well.
Overall I thought the milestone went really well. I got some good feedback on areas that I excelled at, and more importantly the areas that need improving. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought it went well either, because after everything was said and done, I was made a job offer to become a Developer at Obtiva.
So, while my formal apprenticeship may be over, I realize I have a long ways before I'll ever consider myself passed the level of apprentice. In closing, I'll leave you with a series of tweets that got me where I am today:
