Random thoughts about my first week as a developer at thoughtbot:

• I have much to learn about design patterns. The GoF book will be my close friend for a while.
• I know more about metaprogramming than I thought, I just needed the terminology.
• Pairing is an amazing way to transfer knowledge and should be done frequently. I learned a ton during and after because I took notes and then researched and practiced concepts new to me.
• thoughtbot invests a huge amount of time (and therefore money) improving the skills of its developers. It shows.
• osx is a fine desktop environment, but the amount of crap you need to wade through to set it up as a ruby development environment (as compared to debian / ubuntu) is kind of hilarious. That said, it’s working fine now and it wasn’t particularly hard, it just didn’t feel “native” like it does on linux.  I could take or leave osx, but it’d be hard to stop using a retina display – text is absolutely gorgeous.
• I don’t know what I’d do without homebrew.
• thoughtbot dotfiles are great, and the vim set up was very similar to my own but with significant additional refinements. Use them.