Software Craftmanship

I listened to a dotnetrocks podcast yesterday with Corey Haynes on Software Craftmanship. This was a very inspiring and insightful podcast.

He was explaining that he is setting up a learning institute in the US to start involving students with actual live company projects. I think this is a great idea. Our industry is really shocking with no real mentorship and guidance for new programmers trying to get into the market.

I have discussed it with my colleagues and boss and we have decided we are going to implement an internship program here at Media24. This will be between 6 months and a year. The goal is to get fresh graduates from college and varsity and groom them into our fields.

We will be selecting non critical projects that are nice to have for business and the interns will work on them. They will take ownership of these projects and with guidance from mentors drive these projects to completion. This is beneficial to business because they are able to complete more projects at a very low cost.

This process will take the interns from apprentice to journeyman and give them a good opportunity for career growth. We will, at the end of the process, select candidates to join our team and the other candidates will walk away with numerous projects on their CV and be at a certain level in their profession. They will also have the benefit of working in the financial sector which is always difficult to get in to.

We are fortunate enough to have a very senior team at our company and have a lot of knowledge to draw from. We also have a new architect joining our team next week which has tons of experience in the mentoring and best practice field. He worked for a company called BBnD in Cape Town and has literally written their book on best practices and mentorship. We will rely on him quite a lot to get this process started.

We have further ideas of where we want to take this but I hope that this for now will at least help new developers in the industry and give them the much needed opportunity.