Best Laid Plans...
July 18, 2019
Let’s try this again.
So I started this about a year ago and apparently failed 53 weeks in a row to meet my commitment. Sweet.
Well, no way to fix it but to move on.
Update for Myself or Whoever:
Everything with my class went great. My teacher was fantastic. He understood how to find those pieces I was missing and fill in all the gaps. He is a very knowledgeable and genuine person who cares that you learn everything you need to and everything you can.
I started the “class” in November, right after my wedding, and was on my new team right around Christmas/New Years. Everything is going pretty well. I was obviously overwhelmed coming into my team, but everyone has been very supportive and helpful.
My team is made up of mostly people who have been doing desktop development for most of their career AND been at this company for most of their career. This is a little intimidating, but the experience was very helpful during the first few weeks/months. It was very interesting learning how others approach problems and how to start to speak the common language necessary to help solve the team’s tasks.
Some More Recent Things That Have Been Happening:
The team has been trying to work on our CI/CD or lack-there-of. We switched to sprint-ly release cycles, which is a good start. We have also started to put an emphasis on automating tasks. This includes deployments and testing.
TDD is a unique issue for me. I see the merit entirely and want to follow it, but feel held back by my skills to write tests I can trust before I solve the problem. I hope practice will help this. I find it frustrating that I want to do the “right thing” and can’t seem to get an handle on how to accomplish it.
I have still been putting a lot of time into learning. I feel like if I stop, I will be behind. It’s not a great feeling, but it is lessening, so I’m sure it will reach a sustainable level soon.
The Most Recently
I was reminded of this blog when I wanted to share something that happened this week. I have spent a lot of time learning React best practices and trying to be very profienct. It was an area that was very new to most of the team when I joined, so I knew if I was able to learn about it, I could at least be at the same level on one thing with the rest of the team. I guess it has worked out.
There is a person on my team who is very hard-working and very knowledgeable. If I have something particularly challenging, he is the person I know will be able to resolve it. Because of this, there is a lot of non-front-end work for him to do. He has been doing most of our DevOps work and the most challenging back-end work.
He was working on a new React app messing with D3 for data visualization. I haven’t ever worked with it, but I just heard a podcast that mentioned it. He came and asked me how I would handle something he was working on. He continued to ask a few more questions throughout the week and I had answers on React patterns and some unique things about how the new Hooks api worked. Having those answers felt great. Being able to start helping others was a fantastic feeling. What felt even better was being trusted by someone I looked up and being asked to help with something. I know he could have figured out most of the things he asked me. It wasn’t really about me having the answer, it just felt really good to be asked if I could help.
That feeling is what drove me back here. Even just having the one post to look back on was really nice. Hopefully that will be further encouragement.
Hopefully I’ll be back next week.
