My first week was all messy. Here we go…
Day 1
I was 10 minutes late. I didn’t write my time on my attendance sheet. My first assignment was learning about JAVA and every other little things that my team uses for their project. I was assigned to a rather large project. Assignees included one Systems Analyst and two Programmers (me included). The other two analysts and about 3 or 4 programmers were assigned to a larger project. Day one was all about learning: the procedures, the flow, the standards.
Day 2
Being 5 to 10 minutes is already common. No harm done. I spent the first half of the day trying this and that, mostly digging in on the interface’s coding. The second half was a disaster. My PC broke down and restarted four times in a row. I confiscated my friend’s MacBook and found immediately that it was not prepped for development. So much for a second day at work…
Day 3
By the third day, things were getting on track again. I learned a whole lot of new stuff. The framework, the systems, the IDE. But progress was sluggish. I didn’t know where to find what, and I kept bugging my fellow programmer. I could tell that he was really frustrated by his deadline, and the fact that he’s a single fighter in the project held me back when I wanted to ask him for help.
Day 4
Thursday was a relatively slow day. I learned the code piece-by-piece and soon figured out that the framework itself is still so messy. I still had a hard time finding what I needed, and googling was my best escape. This was the day that I did my first commit to the server. Nothing big really, just a few minor interface fixes, a new controller and listener, and some other stuff not worth mentioning.
Day 5
As the interface came together, I totally shifted my attention to the logic. I struggled to find pieces of code that were responsible for fetching data, processing, and then displaying them. I found out that just to add a single query to the framework, I needed to edit at least 4 to 5 class files. But I forced myself to get used to it. I’m gonna be here for a long time…
Day 6
The mood was changing as I approached a long weekend with new hopes. But I was still overwhelmed with the wealth of things that I needed to understand before I start making real progress. My boss already stuffed a deadline on me, and I had to finish my screen by next Tuesday. I guess he expected me to work at home, but I’m not going to. Home is for fun, not work. I’ll just see what happens next…