A few weeks ago, I wrote about my awesome experience shadowing at Treater. This past week, I was able to shadow at Spree. Spree has a great space in Bethesda and does some really interesting things. Spree is an open source e-commerce platform. I was able to look over the shoulders of JD and Wes while there and ask LOTS of questions. Here are some highlights of what I learned…

A lot of the work Spree does (or at least was working on that day) is related to APIs. Having never had the chance to work with APIs (but conceptually knowing a bit about them), they explained to me the different parts of an API, how they have used them to help coordinate purchases and logistics. I also learned about things like query limits and some interesting facts about testing APIs.

A few other random tips I picked up included bundle console, which is an irb session with access to gems in a gemfile. This is most useful when you want to test something outside of a rails application, and therefore don’t have access to rails c. Also, a github tip, when you’re in github, if you press “t”, you can search the repo!

Finally, I didn’t get much into this but one thing I saw was a little bit of work being done in backbone.js. I don’t know much about backbone, but it was interesting to see it “in action” a bit.

Overall, my day at Spree was really interesting. They’ve got a great team and it looks like they’re doing some really interesting work.