First day at school work

- 2 minutes read - 368 words

Today, after two weeks of being in the two weeks’ notice netherworld that included a code sprint to try to get everything tidied up for my previous employer and jury duty, I finally got to show up at Carbon Five.

It was great taking the short walk from my house to the office. Upon arriving about a half dozen others were already there, recapping weekend fun and bike shopping in the lounge area. The espresso machine was hissing in the kitchen and everyone seemed pretty excited to get to work.

Austin Rubyist, now in SF like many of us, Mike has been designated my project lead for my first project. The project is something that’s in a domain really familiar to me: hardware configuration and permutation management. The project is really young so I was able to dive in without requiring too much catch-up time before being able to help debug and work through issues.

Mike and I “paired” the whole day: where you have to keyboards and mice, but one monitor and computer. By doing so we can work through ideas and spot errors faster. That was really a neat experience.

Additionally I was put into the thick of HTML5, something I’ve not done a lot of work with. Thankfully, my Coffeescript research lately paid off as Mike and I were able to get some Javascript functionality implemented.

I suppose, in all honesty, it felt a bit like baby-steps, but still they were steps that got me in the right direction.

I’m also going to try to embrace some new habits:

  1. Keep a daily journal
  2. What did you do, for client accountability
  3. What opportunities exist?
  4. What sorts of automation / tooling would make this work easier
  5. Not overeat at lunch

I also conquered my fear of the espresso maker thanks to the example of my teammates Courtney and my lead Mike. Now all that remains is to perfect my technique so that I don’t scorch the milk.

Other than that, everyone has been very nice and welcoming and really tried to make me comfortable. I really appreciated it. I knew they were really keen before I came here, but people here have proven to be really kind.