Plans for this period

At the end of my last sprint I described my plans for this period as:

  • ‘learning the Rails development stack’, and
  • getting to grips with my new job role.

Well, I’m pleased to say that I really like my new role and what I’ve seen of Ruby/Rails development.

Activity

Some specific activities I’ve completed (in addition to day-to-day working on the front-end of a Rails app) during this period are:

Other useful things I learned / encountered

Having started in a new role I’ve had quite a lot of new technology and processes to get familiar with. I’ve had some excellent help, support and guidance from the tech lead on our project who to like many of the other people I’ve met in the organisation to is incredibly capable, motivated and bright. Some of the best new things I’ve come across are:

  • ‘Reverse i search’ for quickly accessing items from your command line history
  • iTerm2 and Z Shell which combine to provide several benefits to command line work
  • As someone who has been using Git Flow for a while I’ve been getting used to GitHub flow and, I must say, I really like working with the ‘pull request’ process in a team.
  • I’ve significantly improved my commit message discipline
  • Written a few blog posts on the Template Method Pattern, Regular Expressions, extracting Base64 image and my very early experiences in using Vim

In review

I think this has been a pretty good sprint really. I feel I’ve learned quite a bit and improved as a developer. There’s a long way for me to go with the Ruby / Rails stack but I like what I’ve seen and feel motivated to learn more.

Plans for next period

I’m starting my next sprint of 15 March. Should be interesting (Updated 29 April: I’ve postponed the start of my next Sprint until 6 May. This has been necessary for a number of reasons).