Whether you are a new graduate fresh out of school, or you are in the middle of a career change and enrolled in a program to build new skills, your experience as a student inevitably ties certain words to your name. To name a few, there’s “New Grad,” “Young,” “Potential,” “Promising,” “A Maybe,” “Trainable,” and the dreaded, “Not Enough Experience.” After months of struggling to get my foot in the door in the tech world, my time as an apprentice at Cloud City allowed me to gain the experience—one that I can point to and say, yes, I have experience in web development.
What I like about Cloud City is that all of my team members feel strongly about developing quality apps, and that doesn’t just mean writing good code, TDD-ing, or fixing any bugs promptly, though these are all important things. Occasionally, our coders take on facilitator roles in our discussions about design, and our project manager takes time to learn technical skills in order to better communicate with the team. We were able to do this because we respect each other as a team and have weekly retrospectives where everyone is able to contribute their voice.
The coolest thing I learned here, I have to say, is Emberjs. In order to keep up with current technology, we decided to develop an internal project with Rails on the backend and Ember on the frontend.
Admittedly it has been a struggle to work with a young framework that isn’t yet well documented. Yet, as coders we seem to have an insatiable hunger for learning new things, and for me Ember provided the fuel for pushing ahead. On a side note, I recommend Darthdeus’s blog posts on Ember: http://darthdeus.github.io/blog/2013/01/27/state-manager-and-friends/. This particular post is about the StateManager. It clarifies contexts having states and how Ember manages those states.
Now that my apprenticeship has come to an end, I have decided to dedicate time to developing my own project. I'm also looking to contribute my skills to a new team and continue to build on my experience at Cloud City. Lastly, I'd like to give a shout out to my team—Faun, Stephanie, Chuck, it's been great working with you. Thank you everyone!