Starting my third week on the VIP team, I’m starting to feel a little more at ease, a little more at home. The first week was quite a shock to the system. A pile of software to install and configure, the equivalent of several books of documentation to crack through, and a lot of new words that people casually throw around.
I thought I would be riding my bike and going to the gym a lot in the evenings to offset all the desk-piloting, but most nights I was totally wiped out and exhausted. My boyfriend came home about the same time I knocked off work, having spent the day demolishing the inside of a building mostly with hand tools, and we were about equally wrecked.
Brain work is hard!
The second week was easier. I got into a routine of working through something difficult in the morning when Slack is quiet, so I’d have a pile of questions ready to go when Henrique (my training buddy) or Paul (another helpful coworker) came online.
That worked out fine for my first code review ticket. Steph handed me my second ticket, which seemed to be a caching error, on Time.com. He basically gave me the answer at the beginning, but it took several more days to learn my environment and the code well enough to be able to step through it line by line, understand what was going on, and explain the fix.
The third ticket was for pandora.com, and, again, a caching problem. I am beginning to see that I need to know more about caching, as it is a very big part of what we do and a terrific source of errors.
Here’s some documentation I read today:
VIP gotchas and random useful facts & functions
Automattic Idioticon (Glossary)
Lots of good info!
As others have noted, the Field Guide and the various P2s are incredible sources of knowledge – the hard part is keeping track of it all, and remembering every time you have trouble – there’s probably a doc about that.
For future nostalgia, here’s what I was listening to for the last couple weeks:
Sade, Soldier of Love
Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs
Sheryl Crow, YouTube instamix
Bach Cello Suites
Kode Dansk 