Day1 & Day2

It's April 2nd and my second day as an apprentice is slowly coming to an end. The last two days have been full of information and so I’ll try to summarize my impressions in this blog post as good as I can.

On my first day, I was warmly welcomed just before 10 o’clock by my PPM (People & Practice Manager) Robert and my apprenticeship mentor Marcus. Robert & Marcus showed me my working space & introduced me to the colleagues in the office. It felt like I got to know hundreds of colleagues, hundreds of faces and thus hundreds of names. In case you don't know - I'm terribly bad at remembering names, so I'm sure I have to keep asking people for their names. So I felt a little overwhelmed, but I was warmly welcomed by all my new colleagues, which was a great feeling! 🙂

My second day began together with my second mentor Wolfram. He introduced me to the task list "Apprentice Onboarding", which every apprentice will work through. This list contains a lot of organizational tasks (e.g. account & calendar setup) but also some more general tasks like a small self-introduction to all colleagues in Slack which I already did the day before. ✓

At 10 o’clock I attended my very first Coding Kata which was presented by Masha – thanks for that at this point 🙂 The Kata’s topic was the “FizzBuzz” word game which works like this: if a number is divisible by 3 and divisible by 5, we print “FizzBuzz”. If a number is divisible by 3 but not by 5, we print “Fizz”. In case a number is divisible by 5 but not by 3, we have a “Buzz”. In any other case, we just simply print the number – “easy” as that. The first challenge here is to develop this task in JavaScript using TDD. The second challenge is to write the code alternately in the team! This means that one person creates a test (which will fail) and then another person implements the code to make the test pass. If the test passes, this person can (and should) also refactor the code if possible. Afterward, the person who just implemented the functionality will add a new test case (which will fail) and the game starts all over again. This becomes very fun with several people – believe me! All this happens in baby steps, which helps you to develop a solution incrementally. I'm really looking forward to the next Kata session tomorrow – this is really a great experience which helps everyone to improve skills, learn techniques from others and last but not least to get to know your colleagues better. Coding Katas - what a wonderful invention 😃

After a short lunch break I joined Masha’s and Anastasia’s final presentation where they gave a talk about their time as an apprentice at HolidayCheck. Congratulations to both of you for graduation! 🎉

And tomorrow I’ll set up a blog in order to publish this post!