Last week I felt so much more comfortable working at EB Games! It was my second week and I think I now understand the basics and I’m getting some traction. By the end of the fortnight I had solved seven tickets, which makes me very proud.
I always have the fear of being too slow or not doing a satisfactory job. The thought of being fired on the next day or not being approved after my probation is always on the back of my mind. These thoughts are magnified by some health problems I’ll address in a later post. But on Friday before leaving I asked for feedback from my manager and he said they’re happy with my work. That made my weekend before it started!
Code Review
Unfortunately I had a couple of tickets that came back from code review and QA. It’s a bad feeling, but it taught me to check, double check, check however many times necessary to make sure my code works right. Hopefully I won’t have tickets returning due to lack of attention or testing anymore. But I know it’s a natural thing for some tickets not to pass, that’s why we have excellent professionals in Quality Assurance.
Flow of Work
Now I understand Jira, Bitbucket and Git way better and how they work together in the organisation. I know where the tickets are found and how to track them, how to work with branches, commits, pull requests. In the first week I spent hours just trying to figure that stuff out before starting work in any ticket.
That process is out of my way now, so I can quickly start investigating the actual issues. There are still many parts of the system to install in my machine, though. If a ticket is related to something I still don’t have, I have to figure out what to install. Last morning I had to install another database and learn how to change to Zing Pop Culture’s website, which is also maintained by our team.
I’ve also gotten way better at debugging, either using Chrome Dev Tools or Visual Studio. I spent countless hours fiddling with debuggers but I still feel it’s the tip of the debugging iceberg.
Learning Fronts
Now that I know what technologies are used in the system, I have more clarity about what I have to learn. In order of priority, ASP.NET MVC/Razor, Javascript, CSS/Less, React and Svelte. I’m doing courses in the first two. I have to complete and gain some fluency in them before moving on to JS frameworks again, I think learning them properly will be way easier having more Vanilla JS experience.
Finishing the courses won’t be enough, I’ll have to design my own personal projects so I learn the ins and outs. I find that If I try to implement functionalities imagined by myself I learn way more effectively.
I might create a few small projects, but it’s even better if I can create a big complex application with many pages and scripts. One of the biggest shocks when I started last week was the sheer size of the systems, there’s so much going on in every single click of a button. But in the second week it was definitely less overwhelming. Nothing like time and hard work.
Speaking of hard work, back to it!