August 3, 2005

Honeymoon is Over

Yes it's true. As of lunch time today we are officially half-through our training. It's been a long, tiring, and fun 3.5 weeks, and I'm sure the remaining half will be just as stimulating. Now it's time to see what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real (as they say on that one show).

Yes, as the weeks are wearing on we are getting more comfortable with each other and might be using a little less energy trying to keep everyone happy. I can tell my temper is getting shorter and I have to try harder to block out annoyances. Of course it's strenuous for everyone to be away from family and I know that the crap internet here at the hotel has made me scream at my monitor more than once. I'm also sure everyone has personal stresses that seem to infest our daily lives as well. It's really important that we band together and try extra hard to curtail those dark little personality traits that creep up on everyone once in a while. I definitely would want someone to tell me right away if I was doing anything that bugged them, and although I hope I'm not doing that I know it can happen without thinking.

The training is affecting everyone a bit differently. I am finding myself trying to dig in and pay attention, but end up going back to my old pattern of absorbing the lecture in my periphery, and then reading the material for myself when I need to use it for the assignment work. I still pick up new concepts quickly, even the difficult ones we've been doing recently. I am really glad we'll have our training binders to refer back to in the coming months (years?).

I am really looking forward to our next week of working on the reference implementation and getting a partner for pair programming. I like having someone to talk to while coding and it's nice to be able to run my (sometimes crazy) ideas past someone so we'll waste less time and have tighter code.

That's about all from your resident hardwareguy tonight. Sleep tight and WRITE UNIT TESTS!

1 comment:

Forrest said...

Good call on banding together and suppressing our ugly personality traits. I'm super guilty of getting lazy and turning into much less of a peace-maker. Advice accepted.