# Proud Dad Alert

This week I got to spend some quality time with my son Callum. It's his summer holidays from school (and his paper
round), and whilst he was travelling up to my house I sprung it on him that he was about to spend two weeks working
alongside me as my apprentice at Alchemist Labs. He seemed enthusiastic even before I said I might pay him at the end of
it :)

During the week Callum has impressed me time and time again. I've literally never been more proud. My face could have
exploded today as I was sitting next to my boy, seeing the smile on his face as he's doing my job! Building websites
using the same technology that I use every day to produce modern websites for the world's biggest companies.

![photo of callum](/assets/images/blog/2021/08/06-apprentice-coding.png)

I've been helping Callum get into coding for a couple of years now. I noticed he was enjoying coding at school far more than
anything else. Many times he's come home to tell me about some coding he's been doing. One weekend he even re-created a
racing game he made at school from memory, so that weekend I decided it was a good time to introduce him to web
development. I signed him up to Codecademy, and he jumped into some free courses on `HTML`, `CSS` and `Javascript`.

He kept this up and completed the free courses, and was making good progress on the Javascript course which he couldn't
then complete on the free subscription, so I offered to buy him a Codecademy Pro license and challenged him to complete
the `Full-Stack Software Engineer` career path learning `Javascript`, `Node`, `SQL`, `React`, `TDD` and more.

He's been steadily working his way through the Codecademy stuff, but I don't think that can prepare anybody for the
amount of things that you experience day to day in the real world.

For instance his first 5 days covered all of this, plus more that isn't even mentioned here!

### Monday

* Induction
* SSH Keys
* Kanban Board
* User Stories + Cards
* Version Control (GIT)
* Coding (React, JSX, Markdown)

### Tuesday

* Agile 
  * Kanban
  * Scrum
* Lean
* Market Research

### Wednesday

* React / NextJS
* Styling
    * CSS Modules
    * styled-components
* Scaffolding a new website using `create-next-app`,
* Whiteboarded design ideas for new website components

### Thursday

* Built website components
    * Layout
    * Header
    * YouMightLike
    * Body
    * Footer

### Friday

* Training (Codecademy)
* 10% Time (Building his own website, using the skills he'd learned during the previous 4 days)

Before springing the apprenticeship surprise on him, I had put a lot of thought into how the experience might go and
whilst I hoped he had the same genuine love for coding that his Dad has, I had also considered a backup plan of sending
him home to pursue his other dream, sitting at home, playing computer games and doing very little else. Imagine my
surprise this evening when I informed Callum that it was 8:30 PM on a Friday night, and I wanted him to close his laptop
and come and play Mario with me, and he replied "Give me a minute, I just want to fix this one thing". It was at this
moment that I knew that he had got the bug and was a chip off the old block.

From what I've seen in the last 5 days (more like 4.5 days if you consider the fact that Callum got no sleep on the
Wednesday night but soldiered on anyway) I truly believe that he has coding in his blood. I know that if this is the path he chooses to
take, that he will be a great apprentice, and who knows, one day he may even take the reins from me and run Alchemist
Labs.

![photo of callum](/assets/images/blog/2021/08/06-apprentice.jpg)

### TLDR:  Proud of you son!

MY APPRENTICE

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