Tag: objectorientedprogramming

Training Redux…the Home Edition

As we left off before, I was all set to embark on the wonderful world of Java at Home Office. I was going to get a mini-vacation from my everyday work existence, hobnobbing with the city-folk again at The Mothership, visiting the city birds on the walkway, while FINALLY getting some much needed Java training.

And then the Bubonic Plague hit.

I don’t mean to make light of the very serious ordeal we’ve all been living through. In fact, I learned that a friend of ours in Florida has been extremely ill with most of the symptoms of COVID-19, but the hospital wouldn’t test her because her symptoms didn’t exactly fit the profile. She’s been sick for about a week now, and we’re all praying for her recovery.

In light of our global emergency, my company has sent most of us home to do our work—this would be another subject for a whole other blog post (or, “why do all my retired friends now think I’m available all day, every day, to drop everything to look at cute Facebook videos???”). I was mentally prepared for my class to be canceled. I’ve been yet again struggling with the bloody GUnit testing, and figured I was destined for now to continuously hunt and peck through the scant resources I have for answers, while attempting to work through more user stories–all while driving my coworkers nuts with all my questions.

But no…they’ve decided to make the whole four week 8:00 – 3:00 class VIRTUAL.

I’m relieved that I’ll be able to get the (much, much, MUCH needed) training, but I’m a tad nervous about doing this via remote control, so to speak. What if my connection crashes? What if I can’t hear what’s being said? What if coworkers break through with IMs in the middle of my training? I have indicated to people that I’m not going to have availability during class time, but you never know what may happen. What if our lawn guy picks NOW to come do the spring cleanup, causing the kind of cacophanic DIN that’s capable of waking mummified remains?

I did elicit the advice of my librarian friend, who earned her master’s degree online. “Don’t procrastinate!” She advised. She told me online learning definitely takes more self-discipline than face-to-face. Also, she recommended getting up and walking around during any lectures, to stay awake.

So…the adventure begins tomorrow!

Fun with JUnits

…or, why I’m pretty sure I’m grayer than I used to be…if I wasn’t in fact hiding my gray. 😈

The good news is that I’ve had a crash course in working with Spring Batch and I’m now a veritable expert in operating the debugger. I also now understand (somewhat) where to get the data for the payload by running only a few SQL queries against the test data from the UI and using the resultant payload for our JUnit tests. This is definitely a step up from my attempts to get data last week by running multiple queries and cutting and pasting all the information!

Monday, my coworker spend an hour of his life he’s never getting back showing me all this, while attempting to help me with the payload for my testing. The payload still isn’t exactly what one might call stable. I tested with and without my code change and thankfully that’s not the issue–I would have run screaming into the night if it was.

Sadly, I’m going to have to have him help me further, as I ran all the SQL queries I was supposed to to get my new example, but I’m not ending up with the same file format that our JUnit job requires. I’m not quite sure WHERE my coworker found the information, but I don’t think I quite have it.

The adventure continues…

Workday #46: Spring Forward!

Since yesterday didn’t contain enough drama, I elected to multiply this tenfold by taking on a new user story. On the surface, it appears to be something I can handle–simply change the driver age for a commercial or personal auto claim so that the age is Age at Loss vs. Current Age so that it gets passed to our other system correctly. I waded into the integration code for Spring Batch in GitHub and I think I’ve narrowed down the issue to one method in one class. It appears to be an overloaded method, where if you only pass the date of birth parameter, you get the Current Age; however, if you pass the date of birth AND the date of loss parameters, you get the Age at Loss, which is what we’re after. I’ll have to scour all the code of course, to make sure, but I’m fairly certain that that’s all one would need to fix.

DOING this is going to be another matter. I have Eclipse installed on my work and home machines, and I’ve been working with it a bit it at home while doing the Udemy course; but I suspect it’s going to be a lot more complicated with our crazy GitHub branch system. I did try to follow the Spring Batch/Maven setup directions on the Wiki in our GitHub, but I can’t even get past Step One without being told I don’t have access to create a Maven User Token. No, I don’t know what that is, either, but right now it makes no difference, as I can’t create one.

I’m going to meet with my mentor on Monday, to hopefully figure all this out. The poor man, probably remembering the fiasco that was yesterday, put me off until Monday afternoon–probably sensing I’m going to need a lot of direction. My plan is to read over everything in advance, so I don’t waste his time.

Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the best part of the day. I hosed my new Guidewire 9.0.7 setup–as in, I accidentally DELETED the entire thing! I was attempting to be proactive by zipping up all the old files for 9.0.5 and deleting them, but in so doing I accidentally deleted the wrong files. On a more positive note, I really do have practice now installing a new version, and I even managed to connect the database correctly.

Work Day 32: Git-in’ Trouble…

Our Continuing Ed session was awesome today! Working from home enabled me to see the presentation much better on my large monitor. We covered Java and our instructor compared Java object-oriented code with JavaScript object-oriented code. Our takeaway exercise is to add fields to both sets where the fields are missing. It’s always good to have practical exercises to work on. I took copious amounts of notes to share with a fellow student who couldn’t attend today.

In other news, I lost my mind with #%*$^*# GitHub again. They opened up the February Release branch, so yours truly followed instructions for bringing in the branch…not entirely successful. I got some ghastly error in Git Bash saying there was “no such directory.” I think it said “no such directory anywhere” as if to imply nowhere on THIS PLANET. Following the Alum’s advice, I checked out the branch from Guidewire Studio instead, which worked. I applied the patch for my first user story. Oddly, one of the gs files added for my second user story was STILL out there, even though I’d switched branches and done a pull request. I checked, and the rest of the second user story code wasn’t there—just the new gs file. As I have the patch for that one, I deleted that gs out before committing my changes to GitHub. All seemed to work out well…UNTIL…

I checked the pull request and realized that somehow the gs WAS IN THE DAMNED BRANCH. Despite deleting it, the file had managed to hitch a ride on my first story commit! I was pondering possibly wiping out everything and doing a git clone to bring in a completely fresh copy of the branch to apply the patch again, when one of my coworkers made a suggestion.

“Delete it out of GitHub.”

Heh? After having it drilled into us in training that we’re NOT supposed to do that???

“Delete it out!” He insisted. He even sent me a screenshot showing the tiny garbage can icon on the GitHub screen.

As it turns out, the system prompts you to enter a reason for your actions, and notifications go out, so there’s a trail at least.

It still felt sort of…naughty… 😈

Work Day 27: Continuing Ed…

…or, attempting to remember my JavaScript.

Today we had our first in-depth continuing ed session with our Code Academy instructor. He’s going forward with more JavaScript instruction, but he’s introducing us to Object-Oriented programming concepts which we can hopefully apply to our respective language quagmires. I was skeptical at first, but JavaScript OOP does seem to be similar to Java and Gosu OOP. My only beef is that, doing this via Skype, I couldn’t see our instructor’s double-display very well on my work monitors. He was demonstrating running different jobs, which I couldn’t see, while I was frantically trying to remember HOW (I finally remembered to “NPM Install”—DUH). It looks like I’m going to have a lot of W3 School reviewing to do to fully understand everything. I may just work from home on class days from now on—I have a large monitor that SMOKES my work ones. Also, there will be less background noise to contend with. Today, near my cube there was some sort of meet-and-greet going on that was getting rather loud.

Fun fact: There IS a difference between a code inspection and a code review! The code inspection is actually a function in Guidewire (Menu—Analyze—>Inspect Code…). I did this and managed to uncover some issues that had nothing to do with my changes. One issue had to do with PCF methods that really should be classes—this is more of a tech debt issue. We won’t mention the fact that <code> in a PCF should be separate, anyway. It’s the same blasphemy as having inline code in HTML. As my elderly Uncle Jim used to say, “It just isn’t DONE!” I asked about the errors, and our Tech Lead explained that I should just include screenshots with some notes explaining my findings, and let the code reviewer determine what is and isn’t an issue. I think this is the Tech Lead equivalent of “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing!” Although our Tech Lead is a woman and very nice, so I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that…I think…

The good news is that my boss, who was on copy for the code review request, is ecstatic that I’ve actually done some real work, as opposed to peering at documentation, doing exercises, and falling asleep in front of Pluralsight videos.