
I Spent 3 Days With Sandi Metz – Here's What I Learned - jackhoy
http://red-badger.com/blog/2014/08/20/i-spent-3-days-with-sandi-metz-heres-what-i-learned/
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drsmidgenfidget
I also spent 3 days with Sandi Metz courtesy of my company, and it sounds like
we went through the same training course.

I was underwhelmed by the course. Sandi Metz is a big name in the Ruby
community. I expected her to show us some cool stuff -- stuff I didn't know
you could do in Ruby. Generating "99 Bottles of Beer" doesn't fit that
description.

One thing that threw me off was that during the class, she had an assistant
with her whom she would sometimes ask for syntax help. Maybe I'm being too
critical, but this gave me a bad feeling. Imagine sitting in calculus class,
and your professor asks his teaching assistant how to do long division. Kind
of like that.

~~~
jackhoy
I think one of the difficulties is that in a short space of time it's hard to
get everyone up to speed on a complex body of code. So I can understand why
training courses are somewhat forced to revert to smaller examples that
everyone can get in their heads quickly - otherwise you would spend a huge
chunk of time understanding the code base.

For me it wasn't really about the code itself, it was more about learning the
process of breaking problems down and then applying different refactoring
techniques to increase the abstraction.

One of the best parts of the class was the discussions/code reviews and Sandi
really does knows her stuff. My classmates and I had many deep discussions
with her on a wide range of topics and she was always able to explain things
in a clear and concise way.

Perhaps if you are a senior ruby developer of many years experience this
course wouldn't be the best investment but I would definitely recommend it for
junior/mid range developers.

