December 18, 2018
My apprenticeship is over, just now it’s been a big relief not having to worry about how bad I am at self organising and literacy. There were some good parts and great people I’ll look back on my short time at holiday check and think of the good times :).
Although I must say I’m looking forward to doing more programming than posting, so this is hopefully my last blog post EVER :D
I think I should reflect on some of the things that could have been done better as the feedback I got was more along the lines of “it’s us not you”.
A big activity in the apprenticeship is learning a new language, don’t pick you want pick one that’s used at the company like JavaScript, Python, Scala, go, Haskell. I went for C and didn’t get any help or encouragement.
Another activity is blogging, go for a prepackaged blog don’t build your own. I wrote three blogs to use, the first was using a react/redux and scss stack that I know well and like using. That wasn’t good enough for some reason and I got told to just use static markdown served from GitHub, I wrote two of those and then got told off for it not looking nice enough and being ordered properly. finally I decided just to do what everyone else is doing and use netify.
As for writing blogs… I’ve struggled with writing since I was a child, it takes hours just to write these short posts. I explained this to my mentor and manger who eventually handed me a self improvement plan ultimatum, that was a list of the things I explained to my mentor and manager that I struggle with.
Overall I feel I sold short. Working with the teams at holiday check and learning from them would have been an unbelievable experience for me, but that didn’t happen as I was told not too and spent most of the time isolation trying to learn from books and by writing blogs.
I like to end on positive note, it’s just hard to find one right now. Maybe the sun will come out tomorrow :)
Best regards
Marc McIntosh
Written by Marc McIntosh Find him on github