Day In Review

Working with Clojure is a paradigm shift and a new route to explore on my software journey. I am enjoying taking on a language that differs from Ruby in many ways and offers a change of pace. Decoupling functions from data encapsulation has advantages that I'm starting to see. Although Clojure can have side effects, I like the emphasis on side effect free functions. On the flip side, it offers different challenges and requires a different perspective to accomplish tasks in code. The constant nesting of functions can be dizzying at first, but by the end of the day it started feeling more natural. I must give a big shout out to my pairs for the day since they were patient with me while taking in the new code base. I'm looking forward to continuing down the Clojure path as I feel that there are many interesting ideas to explore through Clojure and functional programming as a whole.

After the work day ended, Uncle Bob gave a talk on Professionalism in Software. He spoke at length about the "inverted the pay structure" of software development, emphasizing that software's details are only fleshed out in source code. Uncle Bob spoke about using professional methodologies that accept this fact. Afterwards, I was able to speak to some attendees who work at non-Agile shops. Their experiences were interesting to hear about and I took away some understand of what it means to not follow the methodologies I have been following in my very short time in industry. Moving forward I will take these lessons into account as I try to discipline myself to work more and more professionally.