Day 2

The first (of many) ‘Daily stand-up’

Today was our first daily stand-up. We did not know what one was but Wolfram prompted us to look it up beforehand. It’s tied in with Agile and Agile Methodology, through reading the Agile chapter in the:

“Software Craftsman” - Robert C. Martin

I realised it was a type of Agile Process. The philosophy is based around quick feedback loops; any problems faced in the previous day can be addressed in these meetings and a solution discussed in order to not carry on a repeated issue into the next day; essentially real-life bug fixing. These issues are time consuming and therefore reduces productivity.

It went okay, a bit unplanned and not something that comes naturally. The feedback was to understand the purpose of a daily and base it around that (The above was read-up on after the daily :/).

Self-Assessment

A task of today was to perform a self-assessment. The other apprentices and I gathered in room and went through The six pillars of the apprenticeship and filled in an excel matrix on our individual competencies. The competencies were based on a mastery index called the The Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition which outlines how to develop skills to certain levels of competency. My weaknesses lied in the more technical areas which was to be expected.

Blog Set-up

This I found difficult, I have never done anything like this before.

The first thing to do was to find out how to set-up and the biggest difficulty I faced was understanding the jargon that came with it!

After struggling on my own for some time, I asked a fellow apprentice and ex apprentice for guidance, which put me on the right track and allowed me to google (other search engine derived verbs are available) key words and understand the basics and build up to the actual task execution

Words such as: Package manager, dependencies, frameworks, static-site generator and markdown (Something to bring up in tomorrow’s Daily Stand up).

Once I understood all these concepts I could start looking at tutorials and quick-start guides to create a static-site for which I used Hugo.

After a couple technical glitches; not copying over ‘archetype folder’ from the hugo pre-made Minimal theme and not combining the config.toml files, I had a functioning static-site!

The static site was then pushed to my Github account and then using Netifly (very easy and straight-forward to use) to host my site, I had a functioning blog. But you already know that as you are reading this now (fourth wall).