Well, we’re already approaching the end of the third week of the quarter – how time flies!
Working Life
As mentioned in the last post, I recently started a job at Amazon – August 15, in fact, nearly exactly two months ago. As with most jobs, the first couple of weeks were slow. Benefits elections, onboarding tasks, and various tutorials filled my schedule, and I got to know my team…at least as best as you can get to know a team when you still haven’t met any of them in person 🙂
The gig’s been going great, and those last couple of months have flown by. I got assigned a few reasonably challenging tasks – the challenge nearly always being learning the Amazon and AWS environment, not so much the coding or logic involved therein. Everything my team – the employee benefits team – does is in the cloud, and that’s meant lots of learning how to do things the AWS way. I come from a heavily Azure background, as far as cloud-based tasks are concerned, and while I thought there wouldn’t be much difference in making the switch, there certainly is!
I’ve gotten good feedback from my manager, and I feel like I’m able to contribute at a decent level already, which to be honest is what I expect of myself. Amazon hired me on as an “L4,” their “entry” level, though I’ve been at this development thing for nearly four years now. I’ve been told I can fast track to L5, and I intend to do so!
PR Tracker
As for this class project – it’s off to a slow but sure start. I wanted to have my development environment set up sooner, but looking at the timelines of other teams from past projects, I don’t think I’m too far behind. Really I just need to stay on the ball a little more diligently, since I’m going it alone on this project.
Aside from having gotten the initial setup done, I’m excited to get down to business on the UI! And really, most of this project is “UI,” given that my minimum viable product doesn’t require much of a separate backend, if at all. The primary components to be written are UI-based – screens and “widgets,” which is the typical Flutter term for forms and other functional components that get dropped in to screens (views) as needed. Aside from those elements, there will of course be models, data access objects, and a few other classes which aren’t exactly “UI,” but which won’t be placed into a separate repo, project, or package.
Given everything I’m learning at Amazon related to pipelines and automated deployments, I am wondering if I can incorporate some of that new knowledge into this project. It’s unlikely any of it will be strictly necessary in the next 1-2 months, but ultimately I would like PR Tracker to be a “real” app on the App Store and Google Play Store. If that happens, I will need a streamlined, automated deployment system for pushing out changes…not to mention a decent suite of unit and integration tests. I didn’t say much about testing in my recently turned in project plan – largely because there won’t be much to unit test – but integration and eventually API testing will be crucial.
All the Rest
As for the “rest” of life – just trying to keep my head above water 🙂 Training is going great, thankfully, so that tends to serve as an anchor to the day. My wife is speaking at a major conference in the strength and conditioning industry in a couple of weeks, so I’ll just need to make sure work and school work are done well in advance to make time for that trip.
Should be a great time!
Until next time,
David
