I’m three weeks into my apprenticeship at 8th Light and last week can be summed up in one word: testing.

I started off the week refactoring some code that I’d written tests for, then worked on my first code kata (and even got to demo it at Code Academy), and then in the second half of the week I learned about mocks and stubs and rolled my own to pretty much re-write a huge portion of my test suite.

As a result of all that testing I’ve definitely become more comfortable with Rspec and whenever I write code I have that part of my brain that starts thinking in tests first.

This past week I also felt like I started to get a better feel for daily life around 8th Light and I started to find a rhythm. Although I’d spent some time around the office during my Code Academy apprenticeship with Mike, the first couple of weeks still felt a bit like jumping in the Deep End. At first I was just treading water to get my bearings and make sure I didn’t drown, but by the end of this past week I was a-ok and even comfortable enough to start thinking about where I wanted to swim to next.

I wrapped up the week pairing with Dave Moore and getting my first look at Clojure and Joodo (a framework for Clojure). Despite the fact that so far I’ve spent 95% of my time in Ruby, the language actually looked very natural and I was able to read through it pretty quickly. Dave did a great job of starting at the very beginning too and showing me all the steps to get a webapp up and running in Joodo (and my experience with Rails definitely helped with understanding the framework.) I have hunch I’m going to spending a lot more time with it.

On to Week Four.