Today, I start my resident apprenticeship at 8th light beginning what I hope to be a long a fruitful career in software development and all its fascinating adjacencies. My apprenticeship is 9 months long, after which, if all goes according to plan, I’ll become a software craftsman. This blog is meant as a record for what I learn and still don’t understand.

. . .

8th light gave me a loaner computer that I could use instead of my personal one. It was pretty much wiped clean, so some of my day today consisted of configuring it and installing various things.

My first project as a resident apprentice is to recreate the unbeatable TicTacToe game of my student apprenticeship, but this time in a new language: Clojure.

I have had minimal exposure to Clojure through the Koans, which I went through in early December. So I figured the first thing I ought to do is reacquaint myself with the language by repeating the koans. However, this time I would try to kill two birds with one stone by doing them in Vim and training myself to use this initially infuriating text editor.

At the end of the day, I’ve gotten through 3 of the koans. the elegance of Vim continues to elude me, but it hasn’t been as bad as I’ve been led to believe. The real issue is my typing.  I’m trying not to look at the keyboard and making all kinds of mistakes. In the long  run, I think it will pay off.

Not much else to report, so far the Clojure concepts in parts 1-3 of the koans have been really basic and not troubling. I know the real test comes when I get to functions, which I believe is koan #6.

My biggest take-away today was revealing my reliance on looking at the keyboard while I type. It’s something that I will look to improve moving forward, I just never really considered it much of a problem before.