I just completed the 1st week of my wed dev apprenticeship at Sailthru, which helps businesses and brands engage with “smart data” to deliver custom, real-time experiences to millions of users. As often happens with the 1st few days at a new company, we spent a good amount of time on HR items, orientation and some training, including a full-day orientation session.

ORIENTATION
While I was a bit less focused on digging into the day-to-day workload, I actually appreciated the time and effort the company put into their orientation session, as it gave me a much better understanding of the overall mission, their history and how well-positioned they are in the current marketplace of ESPs and data companies. I also got a great sense of the company culture, which definitely taps into the fun and silly vibe that so many startups try to create. What’s impressive about Sailthru is that they’ve been able to retain the startup culture and vibe, while growing very quickly into a larger company (with a headcount of about 85 and counting). I also enjoyed how many ideas popped into my head as I learned more about the company. Although less focused on Product and Dev, I couldn’t help but start brainstorming potential client prospects or strategic directions the company could take on over the next year or so. And part of what was immediately apparent was just how much room the company has to keep growing…not only do you hear that and see it in the company presentations, but it’s a palpable feeling I get when talking to just about everyone here, and it makes me feel better about my decision to take the gig.

PICKING UP A NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
Although much of our week was focused on the above orientation, I did get to dig into some code. Sailthru has its own scripting language, called Zephyr, which is loosely based on PHP and Javascript. While my core learning has been in Ruby, I was actually surprised at how easy it was to understand and pick up the basics. Our main focus was to implement snippets of Zephyr code into client’s HTML emails in order to pull data from their data feeds (usually articles from publishers). Although I know I have a lot left to learn when using Zephyr, it reinforced the idea that most programming languages are quite similar, so once you get the basics of one, it’s not a huge leap to pick up another.

ON “WE” VS. “I”
So I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my two cohorts, Jasmine and Tim, who are working alongside me and also part of the General Assembly Apprenticeship program. As such, I will likely be writing a lot of “we” instead of “I”, since we are all working together, learning as a team, and largely focused on the same tasks. That may change, but for now, it is a key part of my experience.

BUILDING HTML EMAILS
Next week, we will likely be digging into more of the core daily work that we’ll be doing during our time at Sailthru: HTML emails. Building HTML emails is sort of like going back to the late 90s era of code. Lots of more qualified devs have written about this in depth, so I won’t take the time to go through all the details. While it may be a bit tedious and arduous to learn the process of building out HTML emails, it is also a very useful skill to have and one that I think often goes overlooked at other companies. In other words, while I may not love every second, I am happy to except the challenge and to eventually add it to my expanding web dev tool belt.