Placement

Monday

I spent the first day getting introduced to the essentials. Began the week by meeting the software development team, and then rest of the company – far too many names & faces to remember for the first day. Whilst saying hi to everyone I was also shown around the premises. With basics, out of the way, I spent rest of the day sorting out paperwork, laptop and familiarising myself with practices and software development culture within the team. Also, my first visit to Chatwins!

Tuesday

Quite a relaxing day, but intense on information intake. Spent good portion of the day reading (language agnostic code standards, development lifecycle, SVN, C# basics), being introduced to company products, and playing a game of (awful) pool (might need more practice than I thought).

Wednesday

Wednesday was the first day where I started feeling productive. Began the day off with my first contribution to the daily, team stand-up, learnt most of C# basics (variable types, operator overloading, anonymous (delegate) methods etc., essentially C# is a weird blend of C++ and Java with sprinkle of questionable feature naming). I finished the day in a meeting with Ralph (product customer) & Ian (senior software dev) getting a general outline of my first project!

Thursday

Laid out project (high level user & functional) requirements, attended team meeting to see what is going on around the company outside the software dev team.

Friday

Received feedback for the document I wrote on Thursday, improved the document and proceeded with writing up the technical requirements draft. Also, spent a fair bit of time just chatting away about MCU and RPGs and getting to know other members of the team.

Other

Spent few hours after work, on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday working on a 2D turn-based strategy game which I’ve been developing for ~2.5 weeks at that point. Most of the development was based around:

Refactoring
Adding few mock classes, which later were fleshed out into usable base objects
Incorporating property files
Improving error/log messages There are still quite the ways to go before I share the project, but it’s slowly coming along.

Summary

All in all it was a good first week, few things to take away from it: need to learn to slow down and make sure that my approaches to problems are well defined, and structured, I need to get some extra pool practice under my belt, Chatwins may become my Subway replacement, and working week is more tiring than I remember it being