A New Chapter

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 1

Today is the first day of my resident apprenticeship at 8th Light. On arrival to the office the learning started immediately with a ‘Zagaku’ (learning whilst seated) session on the Single Responsibility Principle.

Design is something I want to improve on so already a good start. We learnt that responsibilities of a piece of code can be split according to the people that use that piece of functionality, e.g. There may be functions within an ‘Employee’ class which do the following:

• findEmployeeById()
• calculateDeductions()
• getDescription()

each one utilised by a different user of the system (IT, Finance and HR respectively). These user groups are all stakeholders of the system but have different needs from the software. They will each have their own reasons for wanting the behaviour to change. This links nicely as Single Responsability is all about code having one context to change.

My next challenge was to start learning how to use a Mac. Having always used a Windows machine in the past the Mac is initially slowing me down as I am less familiar with the shortcuts and layout. Being here to learn, the exposure to a new operating system is another good challenge which I’m eager to take on and conquer.

Tasks for my first iteration started to appear, so I got to work installing various pieces of software, as well as getting setup on the different systems used for internal communication. Already I’ve been invited to a mini unconference, a talk by an external speaker, and the possibility of assisting some of our Craftsmen at a training course.

It’s safe to say at this point that I am excited for the future.