This is blog post number 3 about my journey to becoming a software engineer.

Meeting My Mentor

I waited impatiently for this moment. My Block Dashboard had revealed the time of my first mentoring session and the appointment was conveniently imported into my Google Calendar – so there was no excuse to miss it 🙂 Phil and I decided to meet on Google Hangout. He started by giving me a brief overview of himself, describing to me how be had gotten to the level of expertise he’s at currently. We quickly dove into a technical conversation about the Ruby on Rails framework. Phil explained to me that at its heart is Rack: a Ruby Webserver Interface, and that it is interesting to experiment with Ruby and Rack to rebuild some of Rails’ functionalities.

We went on to talk about my own goals for this apprenticeship. We also discussed my opinions regarding the future of developers and software engineers. We wrapped up by confirming that the BLOC Apprenticeship is indeed a good way for me to reach my goals.

I couldn’t be happier with my mentor and I look forward to learning a lot from him.

The BLOC Dashboard

I was curious how BLOC would organize the huge amount of information they intend teaching me. Seeing the design of the BLOC Dashboard answers my questions. Since pictures speak more than thousand words – here is a screenshot. Note that this is only a tiny part showing 12 out of 144 checkpoints.

Image showing the BLOC Dashboard

I didn’t know what to expect, but I am definitely not disappointed. I think BLOC built a web application that is totally suitable for this form of online learning.