We watched more online training videos today (Zzzzz…), and had more guest speakers come in. I have to say, the DevOps speaker was very interesting, as I’m still learning about that. The other speakers were great, too. During the presentation by the Release Management speaker, however, I saw a lot of stunned deer-in-the-headlights expressions from fellow students who haven’t had any experience with the IT release process. I was thisclose to blurting out, “You poor souls—you have NO idea what you’re in for!” I also wanted to add that, even if everything in the release process is carefully followed anal-retentively to the letter, the resultant release can be a complete fiasco. I still remember the time years ago when a department did a demo to the masses (a “lunch-and-learn”, or as I call it, a “ruin-your-free-lunch-time-and-learn”) for a major release for a years-long project. They had to STOP the demo and end the meeting. Why? Because they couldn’t get past the first page of the site. Angry red error messages in big capital letters were blazing across the screen like a really bad scene in a Star Trek movie where the Klingons are about to blow up the ship.
The only good thing you could say about this is that at least I got to eat the rest of my lunch in peace…
As far as my transition plan goes, the good news is that my coworker emailed me the complete list of what I need on my new laptop, and what network accesses I’ll need. In fact, tech support has already granted me some of the accesses.
The bad news? My new laptop is going to take possibly 23 DAYS to come in. I desperately need a new one, as my regular work laptop is an ancient 2014 model that takes 10 minutes just to fire up when you turn it on, never mind anything else. We were provided lovely, sleek little laptops for our training that were just a dream to work with, but that was only for training. I can’t tell you how horrible it was to give back my wonderful laptop yesterday and revert back to my giant, crappy laptop that has all the speed, agility, and nimbleness of an aircraft carrier. My biggest nightmare is that my new laptop will take ages to arrive, and that the department will make me do BA stuff again, and I’ll be forever stuck again in the same rut. I’m probably being hysterical over nothing. My coworker assured me that, at worst, they’ll probably just have me study documentation and do Pluralsight Java videos until my laptop shows up.
More training videos…my favorite…
Today was the official beginning of our final project, using our Capstone pages, our server from the last project, and Angular. Despite my misgivings, things are going well so far! I tested my server changes, after getting rid of the page renderings, and everything checked out. I’ve been doing what our instructor suggested and approaching things one step at a time. I created the client and I did the easy stuff. I copied in each component that used to be a “handlebar,” set up routing, and fired up the pages, one by one–just to make sure they appeared. They didn’t have functionality yet, of course, but they did show up! I was DYING to bring in the patterns page, too, but that’s going to be a nice-to-have, if I can get the other pages working in time. I also have a Team Details page that would be fantastic to get working by the Tuesday Noon deadline, but that one is really on the “I want a pony” wishlist…