damon kelley

Apprenticeship Retro

At the time of this writing I have approximately two weeks until the my apprenticeship comes to a close. I will not be blogging during the these last two weeks, so for what is likely to be my last blog post as an apprentice, I wanted to reflect on what I have since June.

Reading

7 Books read to date

  • Clean Code
  • Clean Coder
  • Test Driven Development: By Example
  • Refactoring
  • Agile Software Development: Pattern, Principles, and Practices
  • Extreme Programming Explained
  • Release It!

Blogging

  • Blogs written: 53
  • Most frequent tags:
    • Vim - 8 posts
    • SOLID - 7 posts
    • SRP - 6 posts
    • TDD - 5 posts
    • patterns - 5 posts
    • Java - 5 posts

Projects/Coding

  • Lines of code: lotz
  • Solo projects:
  • Number of client projects that I worked on at some capacity: 7
  • Console applications: 1
  • Web applications: 1
  • Mobile applications: 1

Other

  • Talks given: 1, but soon to be 2
  • Estimations given: 40-50
  • New languages I am very comfortable in now: Java, Clojure

Beyond apprenticeship

I have had plenty to keep me busy over the last 5 months. As the apprenticeship has been winding down, I have started to plan my approach continuing my growth as a developer.

As of now I have three things that I would like to start or continue with after my apprenticeship ends.

  1. Blog 1-4 times a month

    I have learned so much just by writing about something I don’t know about or fully understand yet. I would like to keep that up, but I would like to spend a bit more time on each post to get them nice and polished, and fully fleshed out.

  2. Do a kata every day that I code

    When I was studying music in college, I had a professor that would say “you should practice your instrument every day that you eat”. I am going to adapt that a bit, and do a kata every day that I open my laptop to write code.

  3. Always have a technical book that I am working

    Is there really anything to say about this one?