ATG Training, Day 1

Today was our first day of ATG training. I found it very useful to have had some first-hand experience with ATG. There were several “lightbulb” moments where all of a sudden, things I’d seen made sense.

Already having some basic familiarity, I’ve been able to jump ahead to really try to understand how things fit together: I’ve seen them work, and this time I can focus on understanding “why”. I’ve already tossed out some questions to the instructor as well as to other ATG gurus I know, and it’s great to see how things are starting to fall together.

The bad part about any training course is that it is necessarily simplified; as my coworker Matt Sidesinger said, even after training/certification we’ll all be “monkey do-ers” for awhile. I think he meant that we would have the technical skills to code, if not the in-depth familiarity that would enable us to be truly creative. Either that, or too much training leads you to eating bananas and throwing excrement.. In training, we’re given the design and the source code and told how to manipulate it. This is great to realize some of the small-scale benefits to the platform, but it’s a far cry from being able to architect a solution.

We also learned some neat shortcuts and tools that will help facilitate development: