The first big step is done. Last week my fellow Code Academ-ians and I gave our Demo Night presentations on where we came from, what we learned and where we want to go from here. Even though I’d heard most people’s presentations multiple times during practice it was an inspiring evening and I’m proud to call them my classmates. There was a tangible energy in a room of over 200 people as each student discussed their experiences and laid out their hopes and expectations.

Seeing as how I’ve framed much of my experiences at Code Academy through the Apprenticeship Patterns book I thought it was only fitting that I did the same with my presentation. I talked about my cycling background, the shift to something new and the patterns of “Expanding Your Bandwidth”, “Kindred Spirits” and “Breakable Toys”.

Like many of my fellow classmates I’d run through my presentation 15 or 20 times out loud (and hundreds of times in my head)- but nothing still really prepared me for those moments building up to when I went on. My heart started racing, my throat got a little tight… it reminded me exactly of the first time I ever spoke into a live mic during my midnight DJ stints at KRCC. But it wasn’t the presentation itself that made me nervous, it was really just saying my opening line out loud to a room that included some extremely talented developers: “My name is Mike Ebert and I want to be a software craftsman”.

Me? A sofware craftman? A guy that wrote his first lines of code less than three months ago? What do I know about software development? … um well, for starters I know that I need to learn a lot more. I also know that when I see experienced developers write a test, make it pass and refactor their code into something simple and clean I think it’s borderline beautiful– and that I want to learn how to do it. I also know that the cycles of concentration, sometimes frustration and eventually elation that I’ve experienced while writing code feel a lot like training for cycling did– and I definitely enjoyed that.

So the big question now for the alumni of Code Academy 1.0 is “what’s next?”. I think that despite our different long-term goals most of us are at the same place right now. We want to keep learning, keep building and carry the momentum that we’ve built up over the last 12 weeks. In order to do that through the normally quiet holiday period I’ve been hosting a “Holidays with Hartl” study group here at the apartment and Vince, Alfonso, Tom C, Rudy, Scott, Steve and myself have been working our way through the Ruby on Rails tutorial. Some of it is review but we’re picking up on a lot of little things and it’s connecting more dots for us. The biggest lesson for me is definitely getting more exposure to Rspec and test driven development. It’s starting to sink in a little bit more and I’m anxious (and slighly overwhelmed) to go back and rebuild some of my apps using TDD. However, I know that if I start with the small ones it won’t be so bad and I can definitely see how in the long run TDD is the only way to go if you want to build a really solid piece of software.

…and “Holidays with Hartl” is just a plan for the first week after Code Academy. 2012 starts on Sunday with a whole series of weeks to keep learning and keep growing. I can’t wait.