At the end of the week @rsanmarchi and I are taking our first extended vacation in a couple of years and making our first trip back to LA since we moved from there almost three years ago. The trip’s been on the calendar for about a month now and Mike and I set some aggressive goals of things to try and finish on Phase 1 of the Sinatra app before I left.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been able to start picking up some steam and upped the velocity enough that it looks like I’ll be pretty close to checking everything off the list. Although I’m tempted to keep moving on the project while I’m gone (because nothing goes together like code & coffee, even on vacation) I think that hitting the end of the first phase is a good point to take a breather and catch up on a pair of apprenticeship patterns.

For Daily Practice there’s a couple of katas I’ve been meaning to work on and I’ve also been eager to take another run at the Clojure koans. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve really worked with Clojure and I think even a little bit of time with the koans will be a good refresher.

The two “classics” (from all the way back in 1999) that I’m hoping to study a little bit are Refactoring and The Pragmatic Programmer. I’ve been flipping through Refactoring again over the past few weeks and every time I open it I find something new or something I re-read sinks in a little deeper. Both it and The Pragmatic Programmer are books I’ve heard mentioned a lot since I first started programming, so I think it’s safe to put both of them in the classics category.

It might be an ambitious vacation syllabus, but I definitely want to carry some of the momentum from the past couple of weeks.