Making progress

09 May 2015

Wow, just came bag to update this blog and can’t believe it’s already been 5 months.

Since my last post, I definitely feel more comfortable at the job. I feel a lot less like the clueless dog in the meme, more like a 7 or 8 year old now.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made a great accomplishment. For the first time since working here, I did something that matters. That’s right, I added code that adds new functionality to our product. Now, when you ask the web app to give you an excel sheet, you can specify whether you want the totals on the bottom or top, and IT WORKS!!!

When my supervisor first told me about this task, it sounded simple. I think it took him about 20 seconds to mention the task to me. At first, the task sounded simple: Get the totals to go on the bottom.

However, I didn’t even know where to start with this. I didn’t know how excel worked. I didn’t know which code was generating the excel. I kind of just sat there dumb-founded for 30 minutes before asking my supervisor “Umm, so where do I start?”

Overall, it was a great learning experience and it was the first project I’ve had while working that I can say that I truly took ownership of and am responsible for the outcome of the product. Whether that means success or failure, it is nice to be able to say: “Yes, I made that”. Even better is that…

1. As far as my coworkers and I can tell, it all works correctly.
2. The code is pretty well organized/structured such that if someone finds a bug, I’m pretty confident that I would be able to fix it.