My first few weeks at ThoughtWorks have been interesting. When I first got back from India, I spent a weekend as a jetlagged zombie thanks to the 12.5 hours of time difference, but by Monday I was mostly functional and by Tuesday I was good to go.
My first Monday back in the USA I went in to the office, met up with my fellow Chicagoans from TWUXX, and had a series of chats with various people about our experiences and our future assignments. For a week, we mostly sat at the beach (a table where people not on assignment tend to sit... it has a palm tree ^.^) We spent some time looking at making a command-line interface for Mingle. It was all our own project, and we didn't make that much headway, although I learned a lot of interesting things about the structure of Ruby gems.
On the second week we worked on a small Rails app with some interesting algorithm problems- this was an assignment, not just a project that we happened to be working on. We were trying to refine the theory behind some not completely understood complexities in the algorithms. Around the middle of the week, I was taken off the project, so I didn't get to see the delivery of the first iteration... but I hear it was good!
I was now shadowing DevOps on a project in Chicago. I experienced conceptual overload several times in my first day there... not only did I learn about new tools, I learned about new concepts and new fields of thought. I enjoyed it very much.
I learned about the brother build systems Hudson and Jenkins and how they were different from Go/CruiseControl, and servers and server structure and I had my first introduction to CentOS, which is a clone of RedHat. I learned how Selenium, a web application testing system, can be run headless on servers. I began to increase my understanding of the structure and means of manipulating of firewalls.
I learned more about databases and mySQL, as well as becoming competent with ssh keys and server access. I learned which directories (on the servers for this particular project) were used for what. I gained an understanding of the complicated filetree of the repository containing the code that our servers were running. I learned what JIRA is (bug/request tracking software), and how useful they can be... and how many fields there are to fill out!!
After some time, I was given a new assignment, in a nearby location... as a DevOps person in my own right, setting up a simple build system. Now I'm learning to use Frank, which is similar to Selenium but for testing iOS applications.
Not only that, but in my copious spare time, I'm working with XNA 4.0 and I've been reading up on the OpenKinect library with an eye to doing something cool. In my personal spare time I've been trying to get my laptop to detect and understand the input from my SparkFun RFID kit, but it looks like I'll need to use Windows unless I discover something new.
Also I bought a new phone, a G2, and I'm enjoying learning my way around its interface and playing with apps.
My first Monday back in the USA I went in to the office, met up with my fellow Chicagoans from TWUXX, and had a series of chats with various people about our experiences and our future assignments. For a week, we mostly sat at the beach (a table where people not on assignment tend to sit... it has a palm tree ^.^) We spent some time looking at making a command-line interface for Mingle. It was all our own project, and we didn't make that much headway, although I learned a lot of interesting things about the structure of Ruby gems.
On the second week we worked on a small Rails app with some interesting algorithm problems- this was an assignment, not just a project that we happened to be working on. We were trying to refine the theory behind some not completely understood complexities in the algorithms. Around the middle of the week, I was taken off the project, so I didn't get to see the delivery of the first iteration... but I hear it was good!
I was now shadowing DevOps on a project in Chicago. I experienced conceptual overload several times in my first day there... not only did I learn about new tools, I learned about new concepts and new fields of thought. I enjoyed it very much.
I learned about the brother build systems Hudson and Jenkins and how they were different from Go/CruiseControl, and servers and server structure and I had my first introduction to CentOS, which is a clone of RedHat. I learned how Selenium, a web application testing system, can be run headless on servers. I began to increase my understanding of the structure and means of manipulating of firewalls.
I learned more about databases and mySQL, as well as becoming competent with ssh keys and server access. I learned which directories (on the servers for this particular project) were used for what. I gained an understanding of the complicated filetree of the repository containing the code that our servers were running. I learned what JIRA is (bug/request tracking software), and how useful they can be... and how many fields there are to fill out!!
After some time, I was given a new assignment, in a nearby location... as a DevOps person in my own right, setting up a simple build system. Now I'm learning to use Frank, which is similar to Selenium but for testing iOS applications.
Not only that, but in my copious spare time, I'm working with XNA 4.0 and I've been reading up on the OpenKinect library with an eye to doing something cool. In my personal spare time I've been trying to get my laptop to detect and understand the input from my SparkFun RFID kit, but it looks like I'll need to use Windows unless I discover something new.
Also I bought a new phone, a G2, and I'm enjoying learning my way around its interface and playing with apps.