Wow, time sure flies when one is ridiculously busy trying to get up to speed at a new job. I definitely won’t be getting back to daily blogging any time soon but I’d like to blog more than every four months.
I’ve been at Urban Airship since the beginning of June and I absolutely love it. I feel like the luckiest person ever. I have an excellent boss who seems to believe in me even when I’m doubting myself. He’s helpful but gives me plenty of time to figure stuff out on my own and there is a lot for me to figure out. I’ve broken a few things and learned a ton from fixing my errors. One day I completely took out our production servers and watched helplessly as the Ops team tried to figure out how to fix it. I have to say, watching them struggle a bit made me feel a lot better about myself. It reminded me that we are all just figuring stuff out.
We get to work on some really interesting projects. We build solutions to help our customers quickly and easily integrate with UA so we never really know what we may be doing from project to project. I’ve done some code refactoring, adding integration of one product with another, database backfill (to fix a mistake I made), code reviews and many small bug fixes. I’ve learned how to deploy changes to staging and production, how to customize my development environment for various tasks, and how to use a Python debugger to effectively track down errors. I’ve touched on regular expressions and test mocking. I love how much I get to learn. My job is the best!
Today I learned how dedicated Portland parents are. It’s dumping rain and we’ve had more trick-or-treaters than ever.