This post was originally posted on Trunk Club’s tech blog at http://techblog.trunkclub.com/post/25201990811/trunk-club-apprenticeship-week-11.

Braintree’s CFO and two of their engineers came over on Wednesday for our team lunch to talk about how we use their service and what they have in their product pipeline. It was good to hear about their technology, their stack and their practices. Great company, great guys.

I finished reading Passionate Programmer this week. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to start a career as a developer. It is full of good advice, examples and reminders. It is very pragmatic. I’ll write a blog post soon highlighting my favorite excerpts. Thanks Chad!

I also released the new sales report that I have been working on for the last couple of weeks. With the new features that were added to it, the finance team now has a tool that’s easier for them use to notify the company about the sales performance of every sales person. It’s also a more efficient way for them to do this daily task and will save them a lot of time. I do like that aspect of the job, making other employees’ job easier through the use of technology.

This week I feel like I turned a corner: things are easier and I can tackle larger projects. I’m less often asking “How do you do this?” so much, it’s more often “Is this how you do it?”. It feels good after two months of working pretty hard.

Next week: Building my first Sinatra application.