Things what I done

So today and yesterday afternoon I helped out supervising a bunch of kids in the office as part of the company's "bring your child to work" day.  It was more fun than I was expecting I think; I volunteered to get myself something vastly different to do from my day job but I don't think I know what I was really expecting to happen.

The kids were really well behaved though, the guys organising it had them making things to keep an egg safe when dropped from a height with basic office supplies that they could 'buy' out of a budget and sell back what they didn't need at a loss.  Some of the designs were pretty good.  Interestingly the first day (with younger kids) most of the teams had something using a bin liner as a parachute so for the second day, to push them a bit, the bin liner parachute was outlawed.

That's all I've been doing that isn't day job stuff of note though; I've spent the past couple of days screwing around with the database my team uses so that it can store more useful information about performance goals.  There's some interesting stuff there about who decides what goals are and such, but I don't think I can write that here.  It was good anyway, getting the database to work the way I think it should was satisfying.

Feedbackings and team leadings

So two things happened today that are truly of note:

Firstly: it's time for performance reviews.  I have to review myself with both a score and evidence of why I deserve such a score, which will then be examined by my Task Manager and PDM.  Frankly I wouldn't mind much at all but it's all wrapped up in this corporate culture again and I hate that.  Mainly because I don't think I'm going to do very well by their metrics despite the fact that I do my job pretty well for the most part.

Secondly: because I've been around on the games development giveback project for pretty much the longest apart from the graduate who's overseeing the whole thing, I've pretty much been made the team lead.  This is big if you ask me.  I'm scared to be honest, last time I was even close to being a team lead on a project it went horribly... time to make it good I guess.


Oh and on another note... it has now been a week since I half-broke one of our servers.  It still hasn't been fixed.  Just as well that half isn't very important.  I guess that's noteworthy as well...

Keeping track of what's going on...

So it's been over a quarter of the year now... definitely settling in nicely although right now I still don't feel like I want to come back here as a graduate.  In my one-to-one with my task manager a couple of days ago he said that my team lead thought I was getting in to the swing of the work more quickly than is usually expected of an IT so that made me very happy!  There has also been praise from the guy who assigns me work within the team, which always feels good.

One thing that's been coming up a bit of late is people asking me what I've been doing with my time so I think I need some system of keeping track of what I've been working on.  Probably the best way of doing that is just using the internal tools the company has but I'm going to think on it a bit more and see if I can come up with something that's a little more personal to me but not publicly visible.  So not here.

First!

So this is a first for me, it's really not much but it feels good to finally have actually done this:

I have just written a simple shell script that actually uses features like cases and variables.  It's a really simple thing to program but this is the first time I've ever used a script to do it.

For the record: it reads an error log file, pulls out only the lines that are relevant to my sandbox copy of the website and then returns the lines either for a day passed to the script or today if no day is passed in.

I read the server error logs a fair bit; they're more useful for debugging than I think most people know.

Only 10 lines of script but I like it.

Never moving in with people I don't know again

If I didn't have to live here I would never put up with his shit.  Ever.  I can't stand being around him.

He mistakes energy for enthusiasm, loudness for confidence, and sexualised misogyny for manliness.  I want to move to almost anywhere else but God knows I don't have a damn choice now.

My biggest weakness.

Right now my biggest weakness is reading code.  I know that now, it was brought home to me in a big way about 10 minutes ago when my team lead found a solution to a problem I didn't really understand in about 5 minutes.

Needs work, lots of work; no more making excuses about it being PHP and therefore unreadable anyway.

No more.

Giveback Projects

So IBM has this thing they call "giveback" which is essentially signing up for projects outside of your day job... I'm not sure why, maybe they don't think we have enough to do during the day.

Either way, I've signed up for a couple of things:

Bluebricks - an internal PHP framework for creating useful tools and services.  This is basically an extension of what I do in my day job but I have to say that I've been part of the team for about maybe 4 hours total and I've already pushed a change to the working version of the tool I'm on.  It feels like I'm going to have more production code out there for this by the end of the year than I have for my day job but I really hope this is wrong.

Helping work experience kids with a project.  They have some kids on work experience coming in to build... something in early September, I've signed up to spend a couple of afternoons helping with that.  No idea what it'll entail yet but here's hoping it's good.

I feel like I've signed up for more as well but I can't remember anything else off the top of my head.  More stuff as it comes back to me.