The Apprentice (minus Alan Sugar)
I had the pleasure recently of reading ‘Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs’, I have by no means finished it yet, but there was something on the very first page which really leapt out at me. The authors Gerald Sussman and Hal Abelson describe how grateful they are to have learned software development from the feet of masters such as Richard Greenblatt and Bill Gosper. Two particular heroes of mine. I started to think about the vibrant Open Source community and the Internet, how easy it is for us all communicate, yet how lonely software development is. We all work together in our remote locations, writing new features and submitting patches and very rarely communicate on a one-to-one level.
So who are my mentors? When I look back at the end of my long journey, who will I say are the people who mentored me? The masters from whom I humbled myself and for a period of time became their apprentice. In the 5 years that I have been on this journey of software development, I have been profoundly affected by the work and attitude of one man, Chris Parsons. Having left University thinking I had a pretty good grasp of Computer Science and modern development methodologies, I quickly learned that I knew very little. It was Chris who introduced me to Agile, BDD, XP, Ruby and the framework Rails. It was Chris who spent the first three months of my employment taking me from a naive developer with zero confidence, to a competent developer who knew that by using certain methodologies and best practices could write almost anything. The only limitation would be my own knowledge of programming languages.
On the 25th November 2009 he officially became my mentor. When he approached me regarding the position, it was a no-brainer, I accepted after a quick call to my wife 
Today I am really excited/apprehensive about the road that lay ahead. I know that long transition from apprentice to journeyman will not be easy. I’m expecting to stretched to my limits, but I know I have the passion and self-determination to make it.
I’ll be blogging here about my successes, failures and the projects that I work on. I’m looking forward to sharing my journey here, so check back from time-to-time