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These are notes for the Apprenticeship Programme. Distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike International 4.0

Preface

This programme intends to embed the same baseline knowledge into a new person, to avoid discovering holes in their knowledge later.

This programme needs a one-to-one pairing of apprentice with a senior developer. It must be implemented within existing team structure, already working on some project. The reason for such requirements is to present the apprentice with real-life problems. Because of the above it works best with long-term assignements, where you invest in a person and your team dynamics up front to get the work quality you need.

Recommended timeframe for covering the topics below is 3 months, however can be shortened/made longer depending on the progress of the apprentice.

Tested on several mentor-apprentice pairs, always with local pairing. No remote experience here, would probably need adjustment for remote settings. Have such experience - please contribute !

If you have experience being an apprentice or a mentor - feel free to add a pull request here, however small !

Don't want to create a pull request ? Starting an apprenticeship programme and unsure how it should be run in practice ? World seems bleak and stripped of joy ? Contact me: email/jabber/xmpp: cyplo@cyplo.net

Goals

  • for the apprentice to be able to learn on their own
  • baselining knowledge - this allows other, equally trained, people to expect knowledge of the subjects below when working with the apprentice
  • for the apprentice to feel comfortable when asking questions
  • allows the apprentice to formulate a plan of approaching a problem on their own - do not hand over a complete plan of actions

General

Before apprentice starts:

  • decide on the mentor
  • make sure that everyone understands that we're investing the time now to iron out all of the issues today - this means that the whole team is taking a performance hit by accepting the apprentice, and they do want to do it anyway.
  • make sure to announce when the apprentice starts to everyone involved.

Starting

  • look through this document
  • look through other materials available
  • discuss your experience, come up with a plan for first week together
  • after the week come up with the plan for the next week and so on every week
  • treat this document as a rough sketch of a overarching plan/list of goals
  • revise the progress on the bigger picture every week

What's where

  • office supplies

Who's who

  • show the apprentice how to locate subject-matter experts using in-house tools
  • introduce people when working on particular problems [X might know about this, let us ask her !]

Office tech

  • email setup
  • email groups
  • IM setup + testing
  • VPN setup + tests
  • WiFi

Company network

  • intranet
  • distribution lists
  • Wiki
  • Task management

Project infrastructure.

  • Build servers

Knowledge sources

  • schedule slots for reading - make Friday the day of learning
  • Fowler's "Refactoring"
  • RSS feeds [share people's feeds - see .opml files in the repo]

Noting stuff down

  • introduce to 'note everything, sort later' aka 'post mortems and time management for free' approach

Learn to learn

  • review mistakes and sucesses every Friday
  • open discussions with your peers, and not being afraid to ask stupid questions

Tech

commandline:

  • bash/zsh [cygwin if Windoze]
  • pipes, redirects
  • when in doubt use the simpliest, most brute force tools possible, i.e. grep and find. introduce grep as a tool to check for mistakes during refactorings, etc
  • involve grep and find for finding places in legacy code

SCM

project setup -> ability to deploy

Algorithms:

  • RSA
  • hashes and dictionaries/hash maps

Memory management:

  • mapping between native memory and JVM/CLR memory
  • GC
  • heap
  • stack

Computer bootup process

Networking:

  • ssl/tls
  • C10K problem, implement singlethreaded low level server on raw sockets

IPC

Multitasking:

  • OS-level threads vs green threads
  • async io
  • immutability of your data and multithreading - functional programming vs object oriented

Working with code

  • codetiquette - remember that in most cases you are not the only one working on this code
  • code standards - the more boring the better, the more uniform the better
  • ability to read code
  • working with legacy code [freeze with tests + cut out approach]
  • negate condition -> decrease indentation
  • guard clauses at the beginning
  • ifs/switch -> dictionary
  • when to refactor ?
    • symmetry broken
  • continuous refactoring - improving your codebase rather than regressing it
  • error and exception handling
    • do not use exceptions for flow control
    • talk about the difference in execution paths, how exceptions affect stack etc
    • introduce monadic error handling
    • care about what you can handle, pass all other stuff upwards
  • always reproduce a bug with fully automated test first
  • good naming: what it does, not how it does it
  • introduction to TDD
  • inner TDD loop vs outer, acceptance-tests driven TDD loop
  • spikes in TDD

META

  • Recommend changes to the apprenticeship programme

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Notes for apprenticeship programme, to be used by mentors and apprentices alike

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