This post was originally posted on Trunk Club’s tech blog at http://techblog.trunkclub.com/post/25888687086/trunk-club-apprenticeship-week-17.

This week I started and finished the Kissmetrics project that was assigned to me. Pairing with Mike on Monday helped get me started and after that it was just a matter of going through the stories that were assigned to me one by one. We’re also improving our testing methodology and testing earlier in the week, testing with the product manager both locally as soon as possible and on staging after the weekly code freeze. Of course some things were not working while testing. Sometimes the logic hadn’t been thought through, and sometimes my environment wasn’t set up properly for testing. And throughout the week we were getting feedback from end-users that meant changes in the specifications. But I am happy that even with all these bumps on the road I managed to deliver the finished project on time for the release.

I’m also getting more comfortable with releasing, using apache, figuring out log files and understanding errors. While I may never become a dev-ops, I do want to master that area of expertise so that I can help with it whenever necessary. I’m using heroku for the moment for my side/learning-project but as soon as the mvp is live I want to move it to AWS or Linode and learn how to deploy and maintain applications on a VPS.

Finally, I’m getting ready for my four-month review, coming up soon on July 2nd. I’ll be at the office this weekend working on the presentation itself and the web application that I will be demoing. I’m nervous but also excited because while the last two months have been very busy, I feel like I didn’t get enough apprenticeship tasks done. At the same time, I really turned a corner: things make sense, learning is easier and faster, and I’m so much more productive. I’ll continue working on making a great presentation next week.

Also next week: Implementing Iron workers on Trunkboard, using Redis better for performance, fixing sales report bugs before the end of the month.