Placement

Monday

Document fixes
Organised the Sharepoint project folder
Started commiting code to SVN
Added SQL Stored procedures

I also received my first code review, which reminded me: to at least glance over the code conventions before naming things, that I have no clue at per how any MS tech stack works, and that I have plenty o’learnin’ to do!

Tuesday

Code fixes for commit(s) from Monday
Started using a class library so I can test the code and make the software more modular/extendible and code possible reusable
More stored procedures

Overall quite a productive day!

Wednesday

Wednesday was filled with meetings, had a monthly 1-2-1, followed by a series of meetings between myself, a mentor who’s looking after me during the placement and my team leader. To further brighten my week, all of the meetings went well with a lot of positive reinforcement, and clear indications that so far – I am doing great! 😊

In between the meetings, based on some confusion between my reasoning for certain approach in the code reviews I realised I have started implementing my data structure incorrectly, which I managed to re-work and improve in comparison to my original plans!

Thursday

Kicked Thursday off with long, department meeting which was of great for gaining insight of what is going on around me within the company. My key takeaways from the meeting were:

My project could be extensible enough incorporate various other, similar ventures by my client, and not be restricted to the individual goal I am facing now (which I didn’t fully foresee prior to the meeting)
My project is quite similar to (or nearly a copy) another project (project is aimed at a different purpose with some key differences in function) within the department.
Better overall understanding of how the company is performing now, compared to previous years

Friday

Began with a plan to do some system user-related things, however it may be too soon for it, and things I intended to test can be emulated very easily, so those plans got postponed.

Instead I began incorporating the processing aspect of my project. Looking back onto my proof-of-concept (which was utter garbage – but worked well enough to proof concept viability), there are quite a number of improvements I need to make, and seemingly ridiculous amount of comments explaining the behaviour.

With that in-mind, I believe that the functionality can be broken down much further, to reduce some of the current complexity, in favour of extensibility, readability and overall simpler & clearer code structure. However as most of the day surrounded my attempts to decode what my proof-of-concept did and translate it into better code, I didn’t get the chance to solve these types of problems, which I intend to do at the start, or even throughout the whole of next week.

Something I’d like to note down:

Even though I deeply agreed with and try to live by the KISS principle, number of the parts within this processing aspect of the project, will inherently be (relatively) complex and I (currently) intend to keep some of the complex behaviour as this complexity is there to deal with very varied number of use cases.

Other

Housemates moved in
Started incorporating sprite sheets and an asset manager into my personal project, although there’s a lot of work left to do, to complete the transition

Summary

Really good week as a whole!