I did not want to get up this morning but at the same time I was excited and nervous to go back to work. How would it be with my boss on vacation for three weeks? Would I be able to be productive all on my own?

I decided to take the Max so packed up my stuff and headed out the door. It was a beautiful morning. I love looking at our city as the train winds its way downtown. The 10ish block walk from the train to my office was really nice as well. I got all set back up at my desk and got to work on some paperwork I needed to finish for HR, signed up for the 401k plan and got my login working for the online paycheck site. Once I was logged in I saw that I had been paid. Nice! So far this job is surreal. I can’t wait to do a kick ass job for them. Right now I needed to get busy reading and learning though.

I don’t even know everything I read through during the day. Lots of things. I had forgotten how distracting Slack can be. It’s like a fancy version of IRC with all sorts of other features. I’m going to have to figure out how it fits in my workflow without completely sidetracking me. There are also a bajillion places to log in to and a butt-ton of documentation to read. Email is coming in all the while. Let’s see if I can remember most of the things I have to log in to or keep track of so far. Email, calendar, paycheck site, 401k site, box.net with multiple directories, Jive with tons of documentation – TONS, Jenkins tickets, Stash, github with over 800 repos, IRC, Slack, PagerDuty, JIRA, Chef, Vagrant, Redis, Celery, VPN, LDAP, the location of my desk, the location of the bathroom from said desk, all the people and the names and what they do at UA…..So many things. And it’s fucking amazing! I love, love, love all of the information I’m having to cram into my brain. It’s the best feeling.

I screwed around trying to get Vagrant up and running like John showed me on Friday but I kept getting some dumb error. I had been worried about deleting everything and starting over though. It was not working as is so finally I figured it couldn’t really make things worse so I deleted everything and started from the beginning. It all went really well until I needed to start the celery tasks. I keep getting some “connection refused by host” error on a certain port. I happened to be riding the Max home with someone from my pod so I asked him, Joe, about it. He said he hadn’t used Vagrant in a while though but told me who to ask in the morning. That’s progress I suppose.

Today I learned that I got my first paycheck! This might be real 🙂