Professional Development

December 15th was my 3-month anniversary at one45! As such, I had my 3-month review with Tracy. 

It was a fairly straight forward process. I had to fill out a Google doc with things I felt had gone well, things to take a look at, and goals I wanted to set for the next quarter. Tracy then reviewed this, added her comments, and we met together to discuss it. And, well, yall I'm really excited about the goals we set this quarter. 

I have been having serious doubts about whether or not I'm cut out to be developer or whether or not it's something I even want to do. I had felt so unprepared after graduating and entering a real development job. 

The University had been so against group projects or working together on projects until the senior year, and even then we only had one class each semester that last year that involved group work. We'd had one class in sophomore year where we had group presentation on research, but no group coding. The project senior year was not ideally set up to encourage group work. There was typically not enough to go around for the number of people on each team. I didn't put in 100% to this class, I was trying to get my anti-depressants at the right dosage. Yet very few people I know felt like it was a particularly effective class.

Now we're out in the real world, supposed to find a job at a real company and perform effectively in a group setting. I'd never written any automated testing. I'd worked very minimally with a version control system in the last semester. I'd never seen a system with legacy code. 

I was so horrified before starting at one45. I felt as though they were going to "figure me out" as soon as I started. I had been honest with my lack of experience in areas they asked me about. Yet I still felt as though I'd be expected to pick them up instantaneously on day one. 

Thankfully I walked into the right office building. I managed to find the perfect company in which to be a junior developer. They expected that I would be able to learn and that I had a base level of cs concepts. They were very patient with me as I need second, third explanations about the subversion commands and setup, the way our product was constructed, and the various technologies we used to build things. I have learned a great deal in the last four months, and I have everyone at the company to thank for that. 

Yet I still wonder if this is really what I want to do. 

That's where the professional development comes in. 

Tracy wants the "new kids" to start a book club. We won't be reading 50 Shades of Grey, but we will be reading Agile Estimating and Planning. Beyond that, Tracy asked me to lead the group, to set up the start deadline, set the agenda. 

I'm also starting to follow some tech blogs, find a particular article each week to summarize, and take at least two really interesting ones to the team. 

Annnnnnd I'm still not sure I want to be a developer.

The great part is that these development goals aren't developer specific. They are good professional habits to have no matter what field you're in. Learning doesn't stop when you graduate, and neither does the world. Things are always changing and the best professionals keep up with that.

I really feel lucky to have found a company that invests so heavily in its employees. I don't think every company takes the effort to make sure you learn how to be in the workplace. You either get it or you don't.

We'll see where the quarter takes me. 

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work I go

Back in Vancouver after a great 10-day visit to family and friends. Work is steadily picking up.

We have a co-op that started on the 5th. Co-ops are a really neat program. For the engineering majors up here, you are typically required to have a co-op before you can graduate. Unlike an internship, they usually last 8 months and you take time off from school to work full time with the company. This allows you to get more involved in long-term, real projects that the company is running. Plus, the universities help place students, forming relationships with local companies to send constant streams of co-op students to. We're currently conducting interviews to find another co-op to start in May, with the long-term goal of having a program of two co-ops at a time, on alternating schedules so there will always be overlap.

I got to present a Lunch and Learn. Before the winter holidays a few of us had started looking into using database triggers (the Wikipedia site here is actually quite good) to solve a couple of issues we were having. I implemented two triggers for a smaller ticket I was working on as a proof of concept, then presented the code to the team for approval. Tracy asked me to put together a Lunch and Learn summary of database triggers and a recommendation on a set of guidelines under which the company would use them. Lots of research and several slides later, I had a presentation! It went over really well and I got lots of great feedback from the rest of the team.

The service team is doing really well. We've been meeting our weekly velocity goals and often exceeding them. There's been discussion about the growing pains our overall team is facing. We typically have a sprint planning meeting every Tuesday where we discuss all of the tickets that have been pulled into the queue. Now that we've formally split into two teams to deal with the two queues, it doesn't make as much sense for the service team members to listen to an hour and a half of in-depth discussion about the product queue tickets, and vice versa. As a result we've split into two meetings at separate times for each team to evaluate its own tickets, then presenting a very high overview to the entire team on Tuesday. 

We've made another hire who will start later in January. We had to sit down as a team and have a serious conversation regarding our expectations of future hires. Initially the management team wanted to make two "intermediate or senior" hires. Folks had differing opinions of what qualified someone as such, which was causing friction in our interviews before the holidays. I think that the hiring process will have to change. Right now Tracy conducts upwards of six hours of interviews with a candidate before they sit for another one to two hours with the entire dev team. When Mike and I were hired, that was only eight people, including Tracy. As the size of the team increases, it will be more difficult for the entire team to agree on a candidate. A general meeting to make sure no one will want to punch anyone might still be a good idea, but some of the concerns people were walking away with were pretty minuscule. 

The management team has described all of the quarterly and annual goals that were developed during a planning trip to Seattle last December. There are some large, exciting projects ahead. 2015 will be an interesting year for one45.

Blue Monday

This term Max doesn't have any classes on Monday, so we've been meeting up for lunch. Today we walked into Five Guys and were promptly asked how our Monday was going. I was having a very productive day at work, so I responded in a positive fashion. The nice man behind the counter said "Really? Most people are having a rough time. Something about Blue Monday."

Curious, I looked up the term. The third Monday of January, this concept first appeared in a 2005 press release resulting from research commissioned by Sky Travel. I laughed it off and went back to work.

Mike, Thomas and I went out for coffee later that afternoon. Mike mentioned he was have a particular sluggish Monday.

"Oh, yeah it's Blue Monday, Mike!"

"What's that?"

"It's the saddest day of the year!"

"Why?

"Well, it's far enough after Christmas that people have lost the holiday spirit."

"Yeah! That's the way I feel!"

"The days are still really dark and it's so cold out. Plus people have given up on their resolutions."

"Oh my gosh I quit this weekend!!!"

"Plus it's a Monday."

"That's crazy that's exactly how I feel!!!"

That's how I learned about Blue Monday.

Day 61: Who's in the office?

The Countdown To Christmas has begun.

Last Friday we had every single one45-er in the office. All twenty four of us. From now until Christmas, however, it will be a revolving door of holidays and vacations until the office closes for a week while we all enjoy the holiday season.

Today there were four dev team members working from home and one on vacation. Meetings get pushed, the expected tickets completed each week shrinks, and we all wear lots of layers into the office. The sun rises at 8 am and sets just after 4. 

I can't wait to be in Texas! 

Day 60: When can we start?

The Company Christmas Party was today!!

The festivities were to start at 3 pm with our Murder Mystery extravaganza. Everyone waited not so patiently for the hours to pass.

The murder mystery was a hoot. It was pretty much straight from Gossip Girl, which you won't hear me complaining about. Given that, I should have been able to predict the killer much more effectively than I did.

From there we went to the Top Of Vancouver, a revolving restaurant. The food was amazing and the view was even better! 

It was really great to meet all the folks who work remotely. Seeing them in person was different than the crummy webcams we all usually use.

Overall it was an amazing time! Everyone had a great time and made it home safely. That's really all you can ever ask for!

Day 53: Bueller? Bueller?

Anyone? Someone? Please help me with this ticket?

Sarah has been really busy for a couple of days and I've been really stuck on a ticket. 

So today during scrum we asked for anyone available to please pair with me and figure out what's going on.

Thankfully Tracy was free immediately afterwards. We scoured through javascript and php and used Firefox and Chrome and finally figured out which variable wasn't being set up correctly.

Figuring out why is still a mystery.

Day 52: Why? Times 5.

The 5 Whys of this Tuesday revolved around the typo I made that brought down the forms when we did our last upload. 

The "5 Whys" are a session we have during staff meetings to discuss things that have gone wrong during the week, but more specifically why it went wrong. There were a couple earlier on when Mike and I started, so I knew it wouldn't be the whole team tearing me apart.

They've built it as a very constructive session in which they analyze what went wrong midst the team as a whole for errors to occur. 

In my case, there were three code reviews, two very specifically on the line with the typo. There was testing that occurred as well.

I've learned a great deal from all of this. The testing and code reviews are in place for a very clear reason. It's important to make sure the testing is all inclusive and that the developer communicates very thoroughly with the code reviewer and the tester. There is a large amount of responsibility on the developer to ensure that every area of the code that they touch will be tested and evaluated.

It's an interesting thing working directly on a product that thousands of people pay to use. Even at Williams, the things my team developed were largely used internally, so if something went wrong, the clients usually didn't suffer

In the end that's all you can ever hope for. To be able to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them down the road.

Day 51: Who's installed Mercurial?

The question of the day!

A while back we made a choice to switch to Mercurial. We're moving slowly and steadily forward toward the change over, and as such, it's time everyone installed the darn thing on their computers. 

Adam was the wring leader of the task, setting out specific things each of us should do. 

1. Read an awesome tutorial on Mercurial. 
2. Install Mercurial on your command line
3. Test it out!
• Push
• Pull
• Commit
4. Make your own branch! Then merge it back in to the trunk.

This has been on everyone's to-do list all iteration. So, of course, on the last day of the iteration, no one has done it yet. 3 pm scramble! 

We are using SourceTree as our GUI to help make the branches, pulls, and commits easier. 

It was quite a day. Everyone getting so excited about how easy it was to create a branch, how clean and simple the interface is. Simply amazing!

Day 50: Why can't I find this table?

I think it doesn't exist. 

Today I'm working on a ticket that involves a permission. 

Yet I can't find that permission stored anywhere. It's not in the permissions table.

That seems wrong.

Tracy doesn't know where we keep it, either.

Oh, goodness.

Maybe next week.

Day 49: Where do I go now?

You always have to move forward in life. If I have learned anything in the last 3 years, it's that. Keep moving. Even slowly, just move. 

Yesterday was nothing compared to many things I've faced. Yet it was my first real mistake in the workplace. 

But today there are things to be done. So you have to set out to get at least a couple of those things done. 

The Technical Service Team officially kicked off this week. Sarah is leading Mike and I deep into the Ops queue to handle bugs and tasks brought to us by the clients and the customer service team. We have a goal for the number of tickets we want to close this week. 

Goals. I can move towards goals. Yeah. Let's do that.

Day 48: Do I write about the bad days?

I think I have to. Not all days are good. Most of my days at One45 have been great, or at least good, so far.

Today was my first truly bad day.

We released the first update since Mike and I started. This means code I'd worked on was live. 

Was. Was live. For about 20 minutes. Because there were problems. Something I had done was throwing fatal errors. Clients were unable to open any saved forms. 

Forms are a very key part of our entire system.

And I'd brought them down with a spelling error. Instead of "institution," the code had "instution."

Bah humbug.

We rolled back the release, I'd already fixed the bug and merged it to patch. We rebuilt the release and were able to push it a few hours later. 

I've been told that it's not the worst thing to happen. That there were no security issues or data issues caused, which means it really wasn't awful.

Yeah, but I'm the one that caused it. Weirdly, nicely, no one gave me a hard time about it. This all happened before scrum, so when we got to good news and I just said "pass," people responded with friendly chuckles. 

Yet, like so many, I'm my own worst critic. And I ruined things this morning. I made it through the rest of the day, just wanting to be home in the comfort of my big sweatshirt and Max's arms. 

I do truly realize that things could have been much worse. I have really learned a lot about checking everything I do, why we have the checks in place that we do. 

Tomorrow, thankfully, is another day.

Day 47: What does One45 do?

Tonight was the recruiting event! TechFest was hosted at Yaletown Roundhouse from 5:30 to about 9:30. 

That's a long time to be on your feet telling people what your company is. Especially when no one had heard of your company. 

It was tons of fun though! We met a whole slew of folks who were interested. I took multitudes of resumes and cards. Handed out even more (of Tracy's) cards. 

Our booth had Operation for folks to play, and Tina was baking fresh cookies in our toaster oven. Other people had a photo booth, cotton candy, all sorts of things.

It was really cool to be on that side of the recruiting event. I wasn't seriously pedaling my own resumes, desperate to talk to the right person at the right company to land the right job. I was on the grown up side. How odd.

Day 46: Is that ticket closed?!

Ah, yeah it is!!

The massive conversion ticket is finally code reviewed, tested, and closed!!! 

And today, that's all she wrote!

Day 45: Am I going to do that?

The conversion ticket I've been working on keeps expanding. Today Sarah and I identified things that should be made into additional tickets because it's work that needs to be done but is beyond the scope of the original ticket.

My goodness. This never ends.

Thankfully, Sarah told me I didn't have to take those tickets. It was time someone else get their hands dirty with the conversion!

Well thanks! 

Now to find the end of the original ticket...

Day 44: Should this be doing that?

I woke up early to drive mom to the airport. 5:30 am early! At least since we drove down to the airport I had two more hours of sleep after coming back home.

Then is was back to the daily grind!

I'd rolled back some changes that I knew were broken on Monday night before I left work. Today's goal was to figure out why and fix it. 

I tested everything by rerunning the unit testing when I got in. Things still failed. What?

I finally figured out that a method we expected to always return true was in fact not.

Not the end of the world. 

Ha.

Hilarious. 

This ticket keeps getting bigger and bigger. More areas keep popping up that need to be changed as a result of the old aspect I'm removing. 

Well, I at least made decent progress on it today. And got talked into going to a recruiting event next Tuesday night. Shall be an adventure.

Day 41: What's breaking the build this time?

Mom's in town!! More about that later. 

For now, I am tired. I had a late day in the office.

I'm working on removing an old part of the system. Part of doing that involves making your code updates as small as possible, so if something goes wrong, you know the most recent things that could have caused it. Around 4:50 pm, I did the stupid thing of making a commit. 

The build broke. Rats.

I knew which code changes caused it, but I had no idea why they'd caused it. 

Rolling back the code was easy, and didn't take very long at all. 

Waiting for the build to run again was another story. It was already after 5 and I had mom back at the apartment! Yet I was certainly not going to leave and risk having a broken build all night. 

Thankfully, I was correct about what caused the build to break. Fixing that part will have to wait until Thursday as I've got plans!

Day 40: Where do I start?

A while back the medical school process for accreditation changed. A concept that we'd previously had as its own entity now needed to be redirected as a sub-topic of another entity. For every school. Across the whole system. 

About a year ago the team did tons of work to retro-fit everything to fit the new style, and set everything up so that going forward would be correct next time around.

Now, we have to go back and remove everything from the way it use to be. 

That's the lucky ticket I picked up. Woot.

This is simply massive. I went through and read a ton of the old tickets and looked at some old code revisions to see why changes were made and what was changed. 

Whelp. Here goes.

Day 39: What's the decision?!?

We have been debating for a while now. The team is moving toward a continuous release model, and as a part of that, we want to move away from using subversion for our version control. 

This is a pretty good explanation of what subversion is and why it's used.

Essentially, we have an entire team of people all trying to work on the same documents. That can get tricky. We use a version control system to track the changes each individual developer is making and help merge those changes back into the large collection of files (the repository) that comprise our product. You can think of this as a tree. The main trunk is our most stable version of the product. When we want to create something new, we create a branch off of the trunk. It has all the same parts, but we can make modifications without effecting the main trunk. Then, once we are confident in the changes we have made, we can rejoin the code in the branch with the main code in the trunk. The trunk gets a little bigger, as trees do as they grow, and we move on up the tree, taller and taller, making more branches as we need.

That's a pretty simple view of it. We have been using a product called subversion to help us make all of these changes. The main theme of branching is that at some point you have to merge the files back in. You need a system that can compare the state of the files now, the state of the files when you created the branch, and the state of all the other changes that have been made since you created the branch, then decide how to put all the pieces back together. Surprisingly, subversion isn't very good at that part. 

So we went looking for something different.

Git and Mercurial are two very popular competitors of subversion. We have team members who have worked previously with both, so there were very strong arguments and very loud voices for both. 

We spent several weeks developing our acceptance criteria to detail all the smart, non-emotional choices we should make to choose between the two. The comparisons were made and we have made a choice! The team will be switching to Mercurial!! (A pleasantly graphical for being so technical description of Mercurial)

Day 38: What are the poppies for?

This was evidently the stupidest question an American can ask. 

During my further research, this does actually happen in the States. I, however, was unfamiliar with the practice.

Men, women, and children across Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland don poppy pins in the weeks and days leading up to Remembrance (Veterans) Day. 

The entire atmosphere here regarding violence, veterans, and paying homage to those who have fallen is very different than in the States.

On October 22nd there was a shooting at a parliament building in Ottawa. I'd heard about it on the news and from folks at work. One man, a veteran, died. The story was covered nationally for more than a week. Veterans were standing guard 24/7 at all war memorials across the country for the same duration. 

If a veteran was shot and killed in New York, the story would be on the third page of the newspaper printed in Texas. The story would run for one day. It might get mention on the broadcast news.

It's a very different atmosphere. 

Remembrance Day is still a week off, yet people have been wearing the poppy pins for several days already.

Things are different here.

Day 37: Where is the mute button?

My question off and on all day long. 

I showed up at work today. Then started coughing and blowing my nose. Scott and Adam kindly suggested that if I don't feel well I certainly didn't have to be here today.

I am strong! When I was growing up, you honored your obligation unless you were vomiting or running a fever of 100 degrees. I could still stand, I could still think straight, I didn't have a fever, I was going to work.

Then Tracy sent me a message with a smiley face with the same theme. Head home and call in for the Tuesday meetings!

Well, alright. 

I packed up and traipsed home.

It wasn't all bad. I got to switch into the sweats and sit on my comfy couch instead of the board room chairs all day. Plus see the kittens and Max once he got home. Everyone else got to see Amelia and Loki, and there were smiles and laughs every time one tried to set up camp on my laptop. 

Lesson learned: stay home when I don't feel well. Just, stay home.