Monday, August 02, 2010

Craftsmanship Swap with EdgeCase - Day One

Today was the first day of my craftsmanship swap with EdgeCase.

The first thing I noticed when I got there was that their building is in an extremely green and tree surrounded location that makes it feel like you are programming in the forests. Beautiful scenery.

The second thing I noticed when I walked in is they have a room with music jamming equipment consisting of a few guitars and a drum kit. Since I have been recently wondering about the idea of a company having a jamming room for employees to release stress in, it was a pleasant surprise to see that implemented.

Now, regarding the work environment, it was a basic agile setup with big screens and dual keyboards to facilitate pair programming.

I started today by pairing with John on a Rails app that is deployed on Heroku, uses Amazon EC2 to run some background workers and scale automatically, and relies on RSpec, Haml, and other popular Rails libraries.

John prefers using Emacs, so I finally got a taste of using it practically on a Rails project, and I enjoyed learning new shortcuts and reaching some level of comfort with it by the end of the day.

John and I got to resolve an issue and make progress on a feature on Day One.

I am looking forward to more pairing at EdgeCase tomorrow, so stay tuned for my next blog post on the craftsmanship swap.

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