This week, my technical apprenticeship at Sailthru (through General Assembly) officially comes to an end. As such, I thought I’d take a quick look back at my initial goals and objectives to provide a short debrief on my experience overall…
Goal 1 – Master HTML email creation from top to bottom
- learn how to design/style via tables/rows — DONE
- learn how to incorporate personalized data — CHECK
- learn limits of CSS and CSS3 as used in html emails — YEP
- build a number of presentable templates for portfolio by May — SURE
Goal 2: Find one decent-sized NEED at Sailthru and improve upon it
At the outset, I knew this one might depend on their client needs and critical issues, so given the day-to-day workload, it was difficult to lock in on a longer-term project like I initially had in mind. As a result, my take on this one is a bit mixed. I absolutely feel like I handled the daily workload with adeptness and skill, but primarily focused on getting a lot of smaller projects done while making sure I kept learning new things. And as far as “measurable impact on their business,” I know without a doubt I helped them make more money from certain clients than they would have prior to our team being involved.
Goal 3: Keep my eye on the ball for my longer-term job search
I definitely did this well and have seen quite a bit of the pay-off over the last two weeks with a lot of related activity. More on that later…
Goal 4: Learn basic PHP
This was another goal I knew at the outset might not be possible within the timeframe and given our overall goals and daily tasks. Sadly, there wasn’t really any opportunity to dig into any PHP projects during the apprenticeship.
Goal 5: Finish one of my side projects
Also, as I alluded to in my initial post, this was the hardest goal to hit. My side projects really took a back seat once I got into each full work week and the longer-term job search.
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In sum, I felt this was definitely a valuable experience. I learned quite a bit of the nitty gritty of HTML emails, practiced working with JSON and XML feeds, and built a number of landing pages which will be suitable additions to my portfolio. I’d have liked to be able to dig in a bit more on the development side, perhaps learning a little PHP or getting into WordPress, but it’s possible I may be able to pursue that more in the future.
For the full historical accounting, I also thought I’d include an archive of all my related “codeblog” posts just to sum everything up nicely.
Archive of CodeBlog Posts:
codeblog: my web dev apprenticeship begins at Sailthru
codeblog: getting started at sailthru and learning new programming languages
codeblog: a gradual ramp-up, a new title, and “implementing” client dev projects
codeblog: slicing & dicing….and breaking html emails
codeblog: wait, i think i got this
codeblog: okay, now we’re coding; what about fixing the process?
codeblog: programming html emails with sailthru’s zephyr code