Wax on, Wax off

In episode #8 of the Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots podcast, Ben Orenstein is joined by Gabe Berke-Williams and Edward Loveall. Gabe is developer at thoughtbot and the product manager of the thoughtbot apprenticeship program, apprentice.io. Edward is a current design apprentice.

Gabe, Edward, and Ben talk about apprentice.io, how it works, it’s successes, and lessons learned. They also discuss how Gabe goes about mentoring new developers, and effective learning and teaching methods. Edward also gives his perspective on his apprenticeship how it went, his typical day as an apprentice, his advice for incoming apprentices, and much more.

• Listen Now (30 minutes, 14.5MB mp3)
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To have us answer your questions on the air

Email your questions to info@thoughtbot.com or tweet to us @thoughtbot.

Notes & Links

• apprentice.io
• Apprenticship Patterns
• The Pickaxe
• Red-Black Trees
• The Rise of The Software Apprenticeship Academy (BostInno)
• Lessons Learned From Our Development/Designer Apprenticeship Program (BostInno)
• “Gang of Four” Design Patterns
• Intrepid Labs
• Take the Interview

Upcoming Events

• Madison Ruby, August 23-25, “Teaching Rails panel”
• Rocky Mountain Ruby, September 19-22, “Refactoring from Good to Great”

Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, @gabebw and @edwardloveall on twitter.

Workshops and Apprentice.io in SF

We’re opening an office in San Francisco and bringing our full suite of services with us, including workshops and apprentice.io.

Workshops

Our first two workshops are Design for Developers (July 16 & 17) and Intro to Ruby on Rails (August 20 & 21).

We’ve been operating our workshops regularly in Boston and sporadically around the country for about four years now, and we’re excited to now begin offering them all regularly on the West Coast.

If the dates above don’t work for you, you can register to be notified when we schedule the next course at the links above.

apprentice.io

We’re also excited to add another location for our mentorship program.

If location was an issue before, I’d encourage you to apply to the program.

Trail Map

> How do I learn Ruby on Rails? Vim? Test-Driven Development?

Someone asks us these questions weekly. We think we finally have good answers.

Extracting answers from apprentice.io

apprentice.io is a program designed around 1-to-1 mentor-to-apprentice relationships with a heavy emphasis on pair programming.

However, each apprentice additionally has extra time each week to study topics of their choice. They set goals with their mentors and are held accountable to reaching them by publicizing the goals in an internal wiki.

Example goals include:

• Read chapters 14 and 17 of The RSpec Book.
• Review and merge a pull request on an open source project.
• Write blog post about anonymizing data.

One curriculum does not fit all

We’ve been calling each apprentice’s wiki page their “trail map”.

To us, the “trail map” metaphor relates to hikers, bikers, and skiiers:

• start in different places
• want to go to different places
• often change direction mid-journey

Likewise, apprentices (and anyone learning a topic):

• have different past experiences
• have different learning styles
• change their goals mid-process

Announcement!

With 12 apprentices in the apprentice.io program, we’ve noticed common patterns in each apprentice’s trail map.

So, we’ve consolidated trails into a default trail map and we’re pleased to now announce its release under a Creative Commons Atribution license.

You’re free to use the trail map however you’d like, even commercial training.

Initial trails

The trails exist as a single git repository on Github named Trail Map:

• Git
• Postgres
• Rails
• Refactoring
• Ruby
• Test-Driven Development
• Unix
• Vim

We hope learners everywhere will fork these trails for their own learning purposes and submit improvements via pull requests.

Each trail has three sections:

• Critical learning
• Validation
• Ongoing reference

Critical learning

This section lists things like books or blog posts to read, screencasts to watch, code to read or write, and koans or tutorials to complete.

In each topic, we aren’t aiming for greatest depth, but rather the most efficient way for the learner to become productive.

For example: we suggest chapters, rather than entire books, to read.

Validation

This section lists simple tasks the learner should be able to perform during routine development. We’ve never liked quizzes or certifications, but some hueristic is useful for assessment. We think self-assessment is a simple, fast, and low-stress approach.

For example: we say you know everyday git when you can (among other things), “stage a file, create a commit, and push to a remote branch.”

Ongoing reference

This section lists things like man pages and API documentation which we’ll always reference regardless of experience. Many things are not worth memorizing.

For example, we suggest that a developer refers to man git-rebase during a project.

What’s next

This is a work in progress. We plan to add and edit trails as new resources are released or people tell us better ways they’re learning a topic.

We’d love to get your feedback in the form of Github Issues.

Written by Dan Croak.