Day 2

Today was my second day at the company and also a Friday which means I got to participate in some interesting meetings with the company. We had our morning check in as usual, I had something to say this time, talking about the work I did yesterday. However, things got fascinating during our Lunch and Learn meeting.

This was certainly a long meeting, lasting just over two hours. During this meeting I got my first real insight into the day-to-day of craftsmen and what kind of projects they worked on. First I got to listen to a presentation from Gina and how others reacted to it, giving her constructive criticism. Next, we went over peoples show-and-tell for the week on what they did and what input other people had. The process was reminiscent of my capstone, being able to share progress, make suggestions, and come up with new tasks for the following week. Needless to say, I learned a lot by listening in, I look forward to the next one. At the end of it, we played skribbl.io as a fun team building exercise which I won.

I didn’t finish my Clojure Koans by the time I said I would. As a result, at the start of the day I spoke with Gina, and she told me to be communicative about if I’m behind on work or not. It left me to reflect on perhaps why I was told to use the poker program in the first place to estimate how long this project would take me. Truthfully I had no idea at the time, all I could really do was guess, it was my first day, and I wasn’t given the chance to look at the project more in-depth to get a better estimate. I came to the conclusion that perhaps this is some kind of initiation lesson that Clean Coders does. It really emphasizes being transparent with clients and colleagues. If I succeed in this apprenticeship, I will likely have to deal with this exact issue, in real scenarios, on much bigger projects, and with time and money at stake. All in all, I’m glad to have this hammered in now and not later.

As for my actual project, I could notice the improvement of my grasp on this language today. It took me less time to understand new concepts. More often than not I was able to figure out answers from my own deductions without extra research or reference. I certainly spent the most time on destructuring. It was a fascinating topic and left me with a lot of room to find my own approach for answers. I particularly enjoyed one about putting together a string of all of Rich Hickey’s nicknames. I could have done an easier more verbose solution, but I wanted to find a way to make my answer more sophisticated. the rest of the koans were also interesting, but I did not take too long on any of them.