Yesterday was Ricks last day working with us...for now.  This spring I met Rick (@rickcarlino) at our local Ruby::AZ group.  He just started showing up to the meetings and we got to talking at the after meeting drinking hole.  Rick was ex-military and was excited to learn about Rails.  He had been learning Ruby on his own and was interested in web development.  Well, I decided to bring him on as an intern for RebeHold.  It was a great idea.

Rick was almost always the first person to get to HeatSyncLabs, a local hackerspace that we work out of, and usually one of the last to leave.  For about a month or so, Rick was there EVERY day.  The guy is like a sponge when it comes to learning new things.  He did so well that we soon started to pay him, albeit not a lot.  Rick continued to excel and was soon racking up more points getting stories done than the rest of us were.

RebelHold went thru its transition that I have written about before and I put Rick full time on the project that I was managing under Rebel Outpost.  I gave hime a raise; for one week.  The next week I tried out a sliding pay scale based on the user stories completed.  That week I paid Rick our full pay for apprentices.  Not mentioning numbers here but it was like a 280% pay raise.  Rick worked even harder.

Rick has an amazing desire to learn and it amazes me how much he retains.  In college for Korean and Business Management, he still wants to learn Mobile Apps, alternative programming languages, and anything to do with a computer!

Well, he is off to Korea for a semester and we will miss him dearly.  It was great to watch him go from unpaid intern to what he has become, a full fledged developer.  The good news to all of this is, he will one day come back, as long as he doesn't defect to North Korea, and when he comes back we will have a place for him here.

Be safe Ricky!