Day 1

Initial feelings

Ever since receiving the offer to join HolidayCheck as a Software Apprentice, my emotions have been eclectic. I was so excited when I received my offer, from what I could judge from the tech blogs and my interview with the team, I knew this apprenticeship was full of opportunity. The amount the company supports the scheme was evident and from reading the first month blog posts of the previous apprentices, they seemed to of grown in self-identified areas of weakness. And that’s the dream, right? The time and support to improve yourself, both technically and personally.

But with that comes the pressure to ‘step up to the plate’ (one of the many idioms that you learn don’t always translate in German), academically I am not from a Computer Science background; I did a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering. And with that I have the anxiety of not being technically competent to be here. I particularly enjoyed software/computational modules and tailored my final year modules accordingly and knew that it was what I wanted my career to be in. The combination of creativity and problem solving are rarely conflated in the world of Chemical Engineering, however software development seems to fall in the middle of the Venn diagram. For me, coding can take you into your own world, a world full of both the gratification of bug fixing and code neatening coupled with incomprehensible errors which make you want to pull your hair out… BRING IT ON!

First Impressions

The morning of the first day is obviously nerve-racking and was made slightly more stressful with the madness of attempting to register at the Kreisverwaltungsreferat (KVR) at 7:30am in the morning (and failing to do so). But in my cycle of emotion leading up to going into the building, I had settled on excited and was eager to get started.

The morning consisted of getting to know my support team (PPM, mentor), the rest of the team and fellow apprentices. We were met with warm words of encouragement and the team seemed genuinely excited to have us join them.

The warm welcome flowed through the building as we were given a tour of the place to meet everyone. We were introduced to every team in the building and were encouraged to further get to know everyone in the company as the weeks went on.

Apprenticeship introduction

After all the I.T equipment was set up, we had an introductory presentation to the apprenticeship. We learnt the philosophy behind the “Software Crafter” and the six pillars that govern it; software design, testing, tools, communication, agile methods and learning. The apprenticeship is set out to understand; what we know, what we don’t know and how we can plan and organize ourselves in a way to eventually know.

The philosophy of “Software Crafter” and “Agile” are completely new to me but we were given a book called the:

“The Software Craftsman” – Robert C. Martin.

which mentions these concepts. We are encouraged to read through it over the next few weeks and in doing so I assume/hope the foundations of the apprenticeship will become clearer.

All in all, a good first day :)