Java – Page 6 – WildKnitter Codes

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 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…

Day 63: Transition…or, do I still remember all my passwords???

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.

Day 62: Achoo!

I have a cold.

It was only a matter of time. We’ve all been cooped up in a classroom in the basement of our building for three months now. Several people have been sick over the course of our bootcamp. I’m just happy I never caught whatever that one guy had that caused him to stay home due to vomiting. I’m currently chugalugging Theraflu, hoping to stave off the worst of this. I’d just as soon NOT show up at my old department/new job next Monday morning with the Bubonic Plague. It could bring down the mood…

We spent most of today doing self-study “new hire” online trainings. We’re allowed to skip over some topics we might already be familiar with…things like “How to Fill Out a Timesheet.” Other topics are a bit more relevant. This, in turn, was punctuated with guest speakers. I have to say I was especially appreciative of the IT educational resources speaker. We now have a license through the company for Pluralsight. I’ve joked before about how I don’t get much out of just watching coding videos, but I think the combination of this and W3 Schools should help. My goal, going forward, is to learn Java.

I’m also trying to figure out how to keep my JavaScript/Node.js knowledge fresh, as I’m not going to be using it for my everyday work. One thing I thought of was to perhaps finish the server we started for the final project. We only built it out far enough for our required site pages. Over the years, I’ve seen too many developer friends let their skills go stale because they got complacent in their jobs—I don’t want that to happen to me.

On a cheerier note, I’ve been in touch with my manager. He’s got someone preparing a transition plan for me—It’s my coworker who has also been through Code Academy! That should be a plus. She should have an idea of where the gaps are, and what accesses and additional training I’ll need.

I just hope I remember where I sit…