Today was my official commencement date at the 8th Light office in London.

As I already have met Jim and the other apprentices the days before, it didn’t really felt like being the “new guy” in a new environment.

So I could directly go on with my Ruby Tic Tac Toe implementation. The more I dive into Ruby the more I realise what I still need to learn about the language. I haven’t yet internalised all the mapping, reducing, injecting, collecting and more Enumerable stuff that is the Ruby-way of doing things. But I’ll work on that!

As Mike is in town this week, we’re happy he held a small code retreat with us today. It was a good experience pairing with the other apprentices, seeing how everyone in the new team approaches a given problem. Especially when it comes to such “simple” problems as the Game of Life. The constraints were also fun, as there were new constraints I wasn’t challenged with yet in a code retreat. Like “no primitives across method boundaries” for example. The constraint “no speaking” is always fun too, and being a relatively new team it can be really challenging!

In the evening everybody in the office went out together to celebrate Daniel’s birthday. Having a night out really can break the ice and helps getting to know each other better.