It’s been six weeks since I’ve started the Career Experience. We’re roughly about 25% of the way through the process. In this time, I’ve met lots of interesting people and have achieved modest success with my software development goals. At the same time, I have been incredibly busy with my weekends – I’ve been back to Boston twice, drove to Los Angeles on one weekend and flew to Albany NY where I attended the college graduation of my youngest son.
Two weekends in a row in northern California gave me a chance to enjoy the weekend: running on the Los Gatos Creek Trail system, Mass at a different church every weekend and just driving around to see the sights in and around Santa Clara County. It’s pretty dry around here. Last weekend had drizzles but the ground was so parched, it didn’t really ‘run off’ like it might in TX or MA.
Work-wise, I’ve corrected two bugs, discussed the attributes of a new app for an international market deployment and studied the code at the heart of the most important retail app. I’m now working on a feature required for a point release of the client and have developed a feature that collects (with customer permission of course) and validates emails on two frequently visited screens. Part of the weekend was getting it to work properly in the second case. I am developing a strong appreciation of why it takes a long time to develop features for business apps is that the app (in this case for sure) is very complex and nothing is as easy as it might seem. As well, testing method takes three minutes to get to the appropriate screen only to discover that there’s a typo, or it works in this mode, but to try it in that mode requires another three minute test.
Patience and detail-oriented are the watchwords for this experience, for sure.
