
After a few days of watching the clock tick until I got something assigned to me that will take more than 3 min. This morning I got started, albeit slowly, but finally got moving into it and then, after awhile, a milestone. Now I can really see why I want to be a programmer.
Let me explain, at my new job I am put in with other students working on the same or similar projects for my company. The application we are building is in a late phase, therefor getting close to being done, so I have been looking over the source code I now have access to. I am not all that great at VB .NET yet but I can read code a lot easier than I can type it so I understand 90% of what I am looking at, though to most people it would just be a bunch of colored text on a white screen (exciting right?). Before today I decided to be a programmer because I love the lone developers out there, just programming for fun, or open source teams just doing what they love to offer more to the world.
“A Doctor may see 100 patients a day, developers can get their work out to millions, in just a day”
But today, I have come to realize why I know I’ll love this job.
Alas I must go into another anecdote…before this job I worked at a small software development company that ran out of a house and had about 8 employees +1 intern (me). I started working there last summer as a bug tester for both their Windows Mobile application as well as their web application. Bug testing was easy for me, no matter how stable they claimed their applications I found ways to break them, and although I wasn’t a developer at the time I still knew enough about the programs to know where their faults can/will be. After working there over school breaks for a year I got let go, I assume it was because they were so close to deployment and didn’t need a tester anymore. Though on a side note I have since been contacted to come back and try to help them out, I politely declined
So fast forward to about an hour ago, I am looking at the form that I am assigned to change around and clean up and I come across two fairly large bugs. It is now burned into my brain to write down the bugs and report them, so I write them down and get ready to e-mail my boss about it to work on getting these fairly large bugs fixed…then I realized how I am now a developer and its MY JOB to fix it. So after reading through the code (luckily this form is only 250 lines) I saw what needed to be added/changed and to my surprise I knew more than I thought and I fixed the first problem, pretty easily actually. The next one took a little more trial and error and some googleing but I fixed that one as well.
Now why is it significant to be doing my job? Why is this such a big deal? I now realize that I have full access to the code of a rather large application (source code is about 60 MB) and I also have the ability to change anything and create anything, just with a few changes here and there.
This shouldn’t sound exciting or thrilling to anyone but a developer, but for a *very* new one this is a big step, and I know this is what I want to do.
Posted in Personal
Tags: noob, programming, revalation, story, work