I got a job!! The first day was Monday, September 15th, 2014.
Tracy (the lead developer and manager over the whole dev team) emailed us mid-week to let us know that, though she had ordered our laptops, they were scheduled for delivery on Wednesday. She hoped they would arrive earlier than that, but who knew.
Apparently the laptops showed up at 9:45 am Monday morning.
I woke up late.
There was another junior developer starting that day (Mike) and we were told to be at the office at 10 am to start on our paperwork.
I set alarms. I had Max poke at me before he left for school.
I woke up at 9:38 am.
Holy moly.
Ok. Pants, shirt, brush your teeth, grab the documents you need, GO!
Thankfully the office is a 10-ish minute walk from the apartment, so I walked in the door at the office at 9:59 am.
We went straight into paperwork for the Canadian health care system, payroll, and additional company health insurance (yay!). Cory (office manager) then took us on a tour of the offices.
The office is one floor in an 8-story building downtown. We share the building with a coffee company named Taxi with more employees than I can reasonably explain dressed more like the lawyers who occupy the top floor. There is also a game development company somewhere in the building.
When you walk in the main doors, there are a couple of couches in the main area. Offices are on the left, where customer support, higher up managers, and finances live. To the right you see a series of large desks (cubicles without walls) where the development team sits. That side also houses the large boardroom, the washrooms, and the kitchenette. There are more employees who work remotely from other places in BC. It's a small operation, but it's been growing this year.
The development team has daily scrum (stand up meeting) at 11:05 am, so we sat in on that and had nothing to contribute.
We pretty much went straight to lunch with Tracy after that, and I had to once again explain to a group of co-workers that I eat like a 4-year-old.
It was set up time back at the office. We got our laptops plugged into our second monitors, then started going through the steps to set up our development environments. There was a seemingly endless list of programs to download (they use Komodo and Versions). I was having more difficulties than I should have as I am still trying to break down my aversion to Apple products. Thankfully I had a real mouse to use, so I wasn't totally helpless. Whatever I was doing still beat out poor Mike. His full name is Michael, so half of his company accounts and user names had Mike and half had Michael and no one was really sure which was used where. This caused glitches in his VM (virtual machine) install. Poor Mike.
At 3 we went out for coffee with Jason, the product manager. It was neat to hear his perspective on where the product is going, why it's heading in that direction, and products still in conception.
It was almost 4 by the time we got back, and we went into the company "mothership" (Tulsa kids -> a nicely executed version of Serebro) where they had documents for new hires. A briefing with the company codes, mission, purpose, org structure, etc.
5 pm rolled around before I knew what hit me and I scurried home to where it was safe and there were no Apple computers.
