Starting two jobs in one week [my first week as a professional web developer]
So December 2nd was my first day working at Sandbox Studio and to be honest I was scared shitless. It was a trial week, kinda like a week long coding challenge to see if I would be a good fit for the team and vice versa. If everything went well they would offer me a job.
Sunday: was super nervous because I was told I would be working on a rails project but wasn't sure how complex it might be, so instead of preparing blindly I kinda just watched movies all night and held my breath for whatever the week would have in store
Monday: was anxious the whole day and kinda just took things one task at a time, for instance:
Senior Developer: lets get your github account set up with the current project
Me Internally: awesome! I can do that
Senior Developer: You should set up your computer download Virtual Box,Vagrant, Sublime, and Chrome..
Me Internally: awesome! installing stuff....I can do that
So it kinda just went like that all morning, with me being afraid that eventually I would be asked to do something I had no clue how to do or even how to go about thinking of how to tackle it.
First half of the day was spent setting up the dev environment and getting acquainted with Virtual Box and Vagrant and the securities involved in getting access to the project I would be working on for the week.
Then just before lunch I was introduced to the project, and told I would be paring with another fairly new hire who's speciality was in PHP and File Maker, but had only been teaching himself ruby/rails the past few months. With the project and pair introduction out of the way I was free to silently freak out will eating my lunch.
This is it.. this is where im suppose to show these people I know something. That im worth hiring.
After lunch the other developer and I dove head first into the project and after talking through some strategies and drawing out some things, we were on our way, It was very much like class, working with a pair on one project, using your collective efforts to work through one error message at a time. It was great. I was able to contribute a lot and although the project is huge and complex, and a bit messy in some places due to their existing code base. I didn't feel incompetent. My pair knew things that I didn't know and I knew things that he didn't know and when we got to a standstill we just consulted out trusty friend GOOGLE. Day one was challenging, but in a good way and I definitely felt like I learned a lot in a short amount of time.
Tuesday: my pair and I just trudged on and continued working on the project. My boss was pretty impressed with what we were able to accomplish in the first two days
Wednesday: It was a dark day inside my little coding heart. I was flying solo, my pair had jury duty and I was to continue on making progress alone. The following day we had ended things at a pretty complex feature and I was not looking forward to having to tackle this myself (@Micheal Kaiser-Nyman at this point I was taking back everything I had ever said in class about not liking pairing)
I would have done unspeakable things to get my pair back on this day, but alas his civil duty called.. and I was there alone to figure this shit out.
I spent a lot of the day typing code and deleting it.. and then typing it again.. with no resolution. Then the reality of the real world set in.
IT IS INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TO JUMP INTO SOMEONE ELSE'S CODE
my pair was familiar with a lot of the quirks and inconsistencies in the existing code base, so having him was great bc I didn't "waste" anytime figuring strange bugs that weren't my fault or looking for things that didn't exist, we would encounter something strange, and he would just say oh, this is because of this, or something like that.
without him I admittedly spent the larger portion of the day just poking around a very large app wrapping my head around why certain decisions were made.
I didn't let anyone know I was drowning, but I was def going crazy inside. Surely they would notice that the one day I am without a pair, I had made significantly less progress that the past two days.
I side stepped questions from my boss:
Boss: "How's it going over there today?"
Me: "Oh, its going ok, a bit slower than before but def making progress"
hoping that he wouldn't come over and want to see exactly what progress, luckily for me he never did.
But suddenly in the last two hours of the day something clicked and I made a ton of progress, and my confidence was restored.
It was really frustrating, but I am really happy I had the one day alone to test my true knowledge and to really test myself as far as how I could handle myself in such a situation without any help.
What I learned this day, is that
sometimes you don't know you don't know something,
this makes asking questions difficult and there is nothing any company can do to prepare you for this. They cannot think to tell you every single thing that is going on in the code, and in the database especially when things start to get REALLY complex and this is ok. Some questions can only be answered with experience.
Thursday: My pair was back (YAY!)... and we were back to solving problems
This is the day the boss took me to the side, and wanted to know how the week was going and he officially offered me the full-time position.
This is also the day I got my second web development job
A friend of mine is a graphic designer for Philips, the TV company, and she put in a good word for me to her boss along time ago, and he just got back to me. There was no interview process he basically took my friends word that I was competent, and called me with 7 projects lined up for me to do, mostly doing front end dev work for SmartTVs...
So I will freelance with them, its pretty exciting they have ALOT of projects in the pipeline so this should be interesting.
another blog post coming on my experience finishing up my first project for them
Friday: Because the studio space was being used for the Portland Bazaar, so we were forced to work from home this day. Another day without my pair, but this time I wasn't scared shitless and I wasn't freaking out...
I hope things will continue to go well.
I signed the papers to be apart of the team, then flew back to ATL for the next month... I will be back to work in PDX Jan 6th...
no breaks for me though... Philips is keeping me plenty busy...
This is going to be an exciting year.
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