Tag: coder

Work Day 9: We have laptop!!!

I’m happy to report that today I dropped off my large doorstop of a laptop and picked up…another heavy laptop. I didn’t put it together at the time, but as I’m now a developer, I’m not getting the cute little tiny laptop everyone else has. This is a large, industrial-strength machine. I take back everything I’ve ever said about waiting entirely too long to get a new laptop…this thing is SMOKIN’—definitely worth the wait. I got an HP Zbook 15 G3 and it’s awesome! I can’t tell you how fantastic it is to turn on a machine, and IT COMES ON. No waiting 10 minutes for the damn thing just to get to the CTRL-ALT-DELETE screen. It’s fast, has Windows 10 (my old machine was still on Windows 7) and twice as much RAM as my last machine.

Speaking of my last machine, you know your computer is over the hill when the tech guy takes one look at it , gapes slack-jawed, and says, “Oh my God!” Then, when he finds his composure again, says, “I thought we got rid of those things YEARS ago.”

Now I just need to figure out what the hell I’m doing. I managed to get all my settings done (Jack is looking attractive as my wallpaper, and I picked out a nice afghan picture for my locked-screen image).

Then, I needed to set up Guidewire. Following the procedures, I managed to set up the directory, and zip up and wipe out the configuration file. Then I attempted to clone our repository to repopulate the configuration file with our code.

Hilarity ensued.

The good news is that I do have access to clone a repo. The bad news is that I got some GHASTLY error saying there were file names that were too long—six files. I did check and indeed the repo does have some big-ass long names. However, these files are 2 years old. Surely this has been an issue before now??? I googled and found that these is a git config command you can enter to address this:

git config –system core.longpaths true

but I’m going to check with people tomorrow to see if there isn’t already some sort of fix they already do that I may have missed.

All things considered…this is still more fun than being a BA.

Work Day 8: Almost…

Okay, I may have spoken too soon…There’s been a slight snag in the procurement of my new laptop. The tech support guy planned to copy over the data from my old hunk of junk to my new laptop. I have most things on my personal drive on the network, but I do have some things on my laptop for immediate use (in the event that something goes awry with network access). This was supposed to take no time at all, but the transfer failed. Come to find out, I was supposed to be signed out of Outlook. Sure…a corporate worker not on email for ANY length of time… HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

After I finished laughing hysterically, we arranged for him to give this another shot tomorrow morning. I’m going down to the tech area, so that if he needs to physically access my laptop to do this, he can.

In the meantime, staring at videos isn’t cutting it for me, nor is typing along to said videos. I’ve already gone through the w3schools exercises, and I’m almost through SoloLearn–the object/class thing isn’t really sinking in yet. SO…I found a course out on Udemy.com for programming with Java and Eclipse. As a first time Udemy subscriber, I got this at a steal. I’m going to go through this on my home laptop–It took a good hour, but I finally got Java installed. I had a slight issue in that I needed to add the path to the Environment Variables, but once I did that, the application worked fine. This course has a series of exercises, which I think will be more beneficial for me. I figure between this and https://codingbat.com/java I should have this down eventually.

I truly hope to do SOMETHING to justify my paycheck soon. Otherwise, my coworkers are going to start mistaking me for a houseplant and try to water me…

Work Day 7: 100%, Baby!!!

I just got word today that the new laptop is DONE! They just have to make an appointment with me to deploy it. I know what you’re thinking…it’s a laptop. What is there to “deploy”? I think they have to put in my new docking station and whatnot. I don’t care…I don’t care if a ceremony involving Voodoo chants is involved—I’m getting RID of the old hunk of junk that sounds like a jumbo jet when it fires up.

I could be pushy and call, but while I’m waiting for them to call to deploy, I’m making sure stuff is backed up to my network drive. I’ve also been chugging away with Pluralsight and SoloLearn. I’ve been doing more reverse engineering on completed user stories and checking ones still in the backlog.

Of course, I’m somewhat nervous because you know what this means:

I’m going to have to start doing REAL work. 😱😅

Work Day 6: Back to reality…

One of the lovely things about being in training—holed up alternatively in a basement classroom or in front of my laptop at home until all hours—was that I got to put off a whole host of day-to-day responsibilities, a lot of which I really hoped would just fade away into oblivion. Sadly, three-months’ worth of backed-up, put-off, ignored, and/or pushed-aside everyday obligations have started to creep back into the picture.

For one thing, I haven’t balanced my checkbook in over three months. I’m not overdrawn, probably because we as a society rarely write checks anymore, so I don’t have a float on anything.

Also, it occurred to me the other day that I need to get my 16-year-old Beetle into the shop for maintenance service. Otherwise, I’m going to be driving in the dead of winter in a snowstorm in back of some enormous 18-wheeler, where I’ll find out the hard way that I have no windshield wiper fluid. I know what you’re thinking…grow up and check your fluids! Honestly, I check the oil, but I never bother to check anything else, as the mechanics usually do that during said maintenance service.

I went back to the gym, which in itself has been hilarious; especially that part where I really thought that walking and doing push-ups for three months was going to be a viable substitute for ALL 10 Bodypump tracks. Oh, sure…that was last Friday and my muscles are STILL in screaming agony. I can’t even get dressed without needing Advil. Even YOGA was a stretch for me after a three-month absence (no pun intended).

I’m still sneaking about, avoiding other things, evaluating whether or not I need to continue them. If nothing else, I do need to carve out free time to do my continuous coding/learning. That’s not going to happen if I still have knucklehead stuff I’m making time for.

Speaking of which, the new work laptop is at 32.49%.

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.

Day 64: When one door closes…

…we hope my ID badge still works in the revolving door back at the office.

It’s the last day of class. I’m feeling an immense sense of gratitude. I’m sad our three months of training are over, as I’m going to miss everyone. We are all going to meet weekly for additional follow-up training for a few months, but that’s going to be over Skype, so it’s not going to quite be the same. It’s also been nice to put a lot of everyday “busy-ness” on the back burner while I focused on classwork—I got to see what was really important. There are a few things in my life that I think I’m going to let go by the wayside, as they didn’t turn out to be as important as I once thought…not the knitting group, though! Never!

I want to thank everyone for making this possible (at this point, they’re all reading my blog). I wasn’t sure, in the beginning, if I could pull this off at an age where many of my friends are retiring. The last time I coded anything was over 10 years ago, and that was mainframe reporting. Now I’m able to create functional sites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Node.js, Angular/TypeScript, MySQL, Handlebars, etc. Going forward, I’m going to learn Java. I couldn’t have done it without the Code Academy, our great instructors, and the managers that pulled it all together.

I’ve been asked if I’m going to keep up the blog. The answer to that is a resounding YES! Think about it…transitioning back to the department I left as a business analyst, and am now returning to as a developer–it’s material that’s just going to write itself.

I do hope my new laptop shows up soon…