The end of this week marks my second month of residency at 8th Light so I wanted to take a few paragraphs to look back

Good

I feel like my learning trajectory has entered another spike with my dive into this Sinatra app and using an in-memory datastore. Sinatra offers barely anything compared to the built in helpers and features that Rails provides, so I’m having to learn how to build a lot of things from scratch. I feel like that learning, and the experience of learning and figuring it out, is continuing to fill the “gap” between a beginner and an intermediate programmer. 

I’m also really enjoying life around the 8th Light office. It’s a good group of focused, driven and smart people who care about their craft. I can see why former-apprentice-now-craftsman-working-on-site Darek says he misses the place. 

Bad

The deep dive into learning how the heck to do things in Sinatra and working with an in-memory datastore has deepened my level of comprehension but at the sacrifice of speed. My pace has been a lot slower than I’d like it to be. Despite being in the office 8 to 5 every day and then spending a few hours studying each night I have an apprenticeship task list that I’d like to be checking things off of much more quickly. I don’t think it’s a matter of throwing more time at the problem, it’s about comprehending things more quickly. Fortunately I feel like the past couple of week I’m picking up momentum in this regard. 

Change

I think that I can increase the quality of my hours spent working each day by incorporating a solid “reset” break (or maybe a couple of smaller breaks) and probably some more exercise.  Of course it’s Tour time so I probably think about riding my bike twice as much as I usually do, but once the heat subsides I’ll have to start looking into taking lunch rides or at least riding the long way home. 

I also need to keep working on staying focused and completion as much as comprehension. I’ve done a pretty good job the past couple of weeks of not getting pulled into the research rabbit hole of all the things I don’t  know, but I think I can do a little better. 

Oh yeah, and I probably should get a little more sleep…