Category: Daily Work Posts

Work Day 5: Pomp and Circumstance…

Friday was our Code Academy graduation day!

I’ve run into several of my classmates over the past week at my office in the sticks. Everyone seems to be in the same boat as I am—either waiting for a new computer and/or waiting for system access before they can start doing real work. About half of us need to know Java, so we’re all frantically viewing Pluralsight and other resources to try to learn it. It’s the same thing with the classmates who are located in home office. I’m happy to report that the poor guy who had no idea where he was going to sit is getting a desk. The other guy who wasn’t quite clear on whom he’d be working for STILL isn’t sure. I think they’re still fighting over who gets to keep him…sadly, two people were missing. One is on a birthday vacation and one was ill.

The graduation was great! They served light finger foods and fizzy beverages. We had high muckety-mucks come to say a few words. We each received a trophy, a certificate, and a very funny certificate for “Most likely to…” Mine, natch, was “Most likely to be the best blogger.”

I can’t believe I’ve come to this point. I’m so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to reinvent myself. That’s what someone in senior leadership called it at our ceremony, and it’s so true. We all get to go on from here to do work that will be interesting, challenging, even fun…

Now I just need a machine. Last I checked, my new laptop is 23.57% done.

Work Day 4: What I did on my summer vacation…

Let’s be honest. I had the BEST summer EVER. I spent three months tackling challenging problems, creating websites, coding in different languages—all while indulging my love of knitting and crocheting by using that as the topic for for three major class projects. Oh, and I got to defer dreary, boring crap in my everyday life I didn’t want to do anyway.

Now it was time to show someone the results…today was my big presentation for my boss, my mentor, and The Alum. Before anyone arrived for the meeting, I fired up my home laptop, got the two servers up and running on their ports, brought up my final project, got PostgreSQL going, etc. All was right with the world…until I tried to project my laptop onto the conference room big screen. I watched that lousy little dongle flash white over and over and over again. When everyone arrived, they informed me that a non-company device won’t work with the conference room multimedia equipment. That makes no sense to me—what if you have a guest presenter?

Despite the fact that I find this insane, the fact remained that my laptop was NOT playing nice with the big flatscreen. As luck would have it, my mentor had already downloaded my capstone project to his laptop. He also had my GitHub code. I was able to do the whole presentation from his machine. Everyone loved the site! I was able to intelligently answer questions about the application and the process. I also walked them through my code for the final project, too. Overall, it went very well!

Now, I just need a functioning work machine. Last I checked on the tech site, my laptop is 20.59% done. I’m really dying to know what comprises the .59%…

Work Day 3: Waiting…

I looked up the status on my laptop through our tech site, and it’s apparently 17.62% complete. That’s a slight improvement over the 14.48% it was at yesterday.

More Pluralsight today. Fun times. The good news is that The Alum pointed me in the direction of Simon Allardice’s video “What is Programming?” We did view this one for our Code Academy pre-work, but she reminded me that there is a section on object-oriented programming. It did help me to better understand the quagmire that is Classes, Objects, etc. for Java. I peaked ahead on W3 Schools, and apparently there are also “packages” but I’m trying not to think about that right now…

I’ve also been looking at our enterprise GitHub to better understand the code. May we pause here to say that our application code is NOTHING like the tiny bit of code for the classroom assignments. By that, I mean if you decided to print out our GitHub, you’d probably take out the forest for an entire state, and that’s for ONE repository. There are several repos for our application. I couldn’t tell you how all this code interacts and relates to the site. In an effort to make some sense of it, I’ve been taking past user stories for our Agile team and trying to reverse engineer them, to see what was changed. The simplest one I’ve found so far was changed in two jobs—most changes involve at least four jobs. I think, once I get my laptop and can set up my environment, I’m going to need to have someone walk me through the code, to explain how it’s working.

From what I can figure out so far, the code appears to be aligned with the major sections of the application—natch. The repos appear to be aligned to the database groups/schemas. I’m familiar with those, as I’ve done lots of database-querying as a BA. What I may do next is to get out the data mapping documents to see if I can align the field names with the fields in the application.

Tomorrow is my big presentation. I’m going to be showing my mentor, The Alum, and my manager my final project from class. Needless to say, I’m going to need to bring in my own home computer…I suspect that running a client and server on my present work machine would be…less than successful…

Work Day 2: This is Taz…

…he’s currently more useful than I am. At least he can sharpen pencils.

I met with my Mentor today over Skype, where he got a firsthand look at how SLOW my current work laptop is. He quickly decided that I’m better off reviewing documentation, becoming familiar with our company GitHub, exploring other links, reviewing the code, and doing tutorials until my new laptop comes in. So, I did all that today. I continued reviewing the Pluralsight video and W3 Schools for Java…until they got to the part about “objects,” “classes,” “constructors,” etc. That sonic boom you heard clear across the cosmos was my head exploding.

HEH???

My plan is to go over all that again tomorrow, and hope that overnight, while I sleep, tiny elves implant understanding in my brain, because I have NO IDEA what the hell it all means.

Work Day 1: It’s a miracle…

…I remembered where I sit!

I need to rethink this blog post numbering system. Otherwise, we’re going to be up to Work Day #5,432…

My big return today from Code Academy to my department was sort of an anti-climax. I got there around 7:30 a.m. and hardly anyone was in yet. As several people were either working from home or off on PTO, not many more showed up. After three months in a classroom with 15 other people, it was entirely too quiet! Also, in my absence, the cubicle elves apparently decided to give us higher walls, so I couldn’t even tell at first if ANYONE was in the office.

The good news is that my laptop request is approved and will be built once the machine comes in. My mentor—and, in the interest of anonymity I’ll just call the Code Academy alum helping me with my setup as “the Alum”—recommended some documentation and Pluralsight Java tutorials until my new laptop arrives…I’m supplementing this with w3schools.com. Our instructor is going to set up training when we start meeting for our ongoing education, but that’s weeks from now. I want to get up and running as soon as possible with Java. I’m also going to have to learn Gosu.

I’m meeting with my mentor tomorrow to see if there’s ANYTHING I can with my current laptop—short of tossing it out the window.