My first week at Highgroove Studios has flown by faster that I thought possible. It was a flurry of activity that varied from learning about the Highgroove way of developing software, to reading Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It in order to better understand the aspects of a ROWE, to pairing with all of the other developers in order to learn a little bit about their personal work flows. This gave me a brief introduction to the various projects all of the Highgroovers are working on, as well as the various developer tools that they use to be more productive. I now feel like a real part of the team, and I am excited to get started on a project myself.

Read on for more insight into my first week.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to get hired by Highgroove right after graduating from Georgia Tech. Since this is my first real job coming out of college, it has been a very easy transition into the ROWE mindset. The biggest aid to getting myself to focus on results has been the ‘Welcome to the team’ page on our company intranet. This has been an immense help for getting me up to speed because it clearly defines a set of tasks that I have to complete in my first weeks on the job.

My first couple days involved reading documentation about the company itself, learning how to perform code reviews from various Highgroovers, and even posting a funny cat gif in the company campfire room. For the rest of my first iteration I was pairing with several Highgroovers every day leaning things such as what project they were working on, their editor of choice (vim is the best), how they use git to manage their project, as well as any cool ruby gems they are using in the project. I have already made a list of things that I saw during my pairings that I want to research more and it includes: the terminal multiplexer tmux, the Pow rack server, the state_machine ruby gem, and queue_classic for running background jobs in an application. I even picked up a few tips for using vim more effectively.

My favorite part about Highroove so far has been how connected everyone is. Even if someone decides to work from home or in a coffee shop they will usually be in the company chat room. If I ever have a question about something, or if I have spent more than ten minutes trying to figure something out I can just ask in the chat room. In fact, I am required to ask questions when I don’t understand something. I know now that the biggest mistake that I can make at Highgroove is to not ask questions when I need it. Even if I don’t get a direct answer I will still be pointed in the right direction. I am so happy that I get to work with such an incredible group of developers, and I greatly look forward to all the exciting projects that I will work on in the future.

Image credit: hiddenloop