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Jessie A Young
1. What was your experience as a thoughtbot apprentice?
As an apprentice, my daily schedule was up to me. For the first couple of weeks, I mostly played vim-adventures and looked through the thoughtbot Learn trails to identify areas I needed to work on. During those weeks, I also began an app that would serve as a sandbox for my learning. My thoughtbot mentor would pair with me on that app for an average of an hour or two a day. I would sometimes pair with my mentor on his client work, too.
As I progressed in my apprenticeship, I felt like I wasn't getting everything that I could out of the experience. While being given the time, freedom, and support to do individual learning is great, what makes thoughtbot's apprenticeship unique is that you are sitting in the same room as dozens of amazing developers. To not take full advantage of that is a mistake.
And so, during my final two months as an apprentice I focused on doing whatever client work my mentor was doing. thoughtbot doesn't charge clients for apprentice time, so there was no pressure for me to churn out features or 'get it right' the first time. At the same time, because I was contributing to client work, I found that I was able to get problem solving support from my mentor and the other developers on the project much more easily. I was also learning more about the actual work of being a developer (including planning and retrospective meetings, project management, git flow, etc) than I had when I was working on my own sandbox app.
Bottom line: apprentices have the freedom to do whatever they want, but I found my apprenticeship most valuable when I was doing all of the things that full time developers at thoughtbot do.
2. What was your background when you applied?
Prior to apprentice.io, I spent 3+ years learning Rails on the side and attended Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco. I had no formal computer science background, which is common for apprentices (and developers) at thoughtbot.
In terms of skill level, this level of experience meant that I could easily write well-tested vanilla ruby apps or shoddily-tested rails apps, but the idea of getting a feature description and building that feature on an existing codebase was new to me. I knew enough about Ruby/Rails/JavaScript that when I had a question about something I was seeing I could describe it in precise terms rather than just saying "it's broken."
3. What are you doing now?
I have now been a full time developer at thoughtbot for almost a year. It is common for thoughtbot to hire apprentices, although not guaranteed or every apprentice's end-goal.
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1. What was your experience as a thoughtbot apprentice?
As an apprentice, my daily schedule was up to me. For the first couple of weeks, I mostly played vim-adventures and looked through the thoughtbot Learn trails to identify areas I needed to work on. During those weeks, I also began an app that would serve as a sandbox for my learning. My thoughtbot mentor would pair with me on that app for an average of an hour or two a day. I would sometimes pair with my mentor on his client work, too.
As I progressed in my apprenticeship, I felt like I wasn't getting everything that I could out of the experience. While being given the time, freedom, and support to do individual learning is great, what makes thoughtbot's apprenticeship unique is that you are sitting in the same room as dozens of amazing developers. To not take full advantage of that is a mistake.
And so, during my final two months as an apprentice I focused on doing whatever client work my mentor was doing. thoughtbot doesn't charge clients for apprentice time, so there was no pressure for me to churn out features or 'get it right' the first time. At the same time, because I was contributing to client work, I found that I was able to get problem solving support from my mentor and the other developers on the project much more easily. I was also learning more about the actual work of being a developer (including planning and retrospective meetings, project management, git flow, etc) than I had when I was working on my own sandbox app.
Bottom line: apprentices have the freedom to do whatever they want, but I found my apprenticeship most valuable when I was doing all of the things that full time developers at thoughtbot do.
2. What was your background when you applied?
Prior to apprentice.io, I spent 3+ years learning Rails on the side and attended Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco. I had no formal computer science background, which is common for apprentices (and developers) at thoughtbot.
In terms of skill level, this level of experience meant that I could easily write well-tested vanilla ruby apps or shoddily-tested rails apps, but the idea of getting a feature description and building that feature on an existing codebase was new to me. I knew enough about Ruby/Rails/JavaScript that when I had a question about something I was seeing I could describe it in precise terms rather than just saying "it's broken."
3. What are you doing now?
I have now been a full time developer at thoughtbot for almost a year. It is common for thoughtbot to hire apprentices, although not guaranteed or every apprentice's end-goal.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
