There are only six more weeks to my internship at Airbus UK. In these six weeks, I must finish whatever I can and document as much code as possible in the hope that the app I am writing would be picked up on easily by someone else. The tasks are spread out with enough time between each one to ensure even someone with the competency of an idiot can succeed.
There are 20 days set aside for writing documentations. In that period I have to make sure I write enough technical docs that people will be able to understand my code. What worries me is that there’s no unittest for about 80% of the code.
An important thing I picked up on during this year was to make sure I try to get things done. It’s all too easy to be against design decisions and no work gets done. I just had to persevere. I think this will come in very handy when I go back to my studies.
I am sure this perserverance will allow me to finish my work at Airbus.
The Crescent in Clifton on Christmas Day, 2008
Let me start by wishing you all a Happy New Year. I remember my promise to myself that I would follow up on my presentation. What presentation? I gave a presentation on the 12th of December last year on the work I have been doing for Airbus. Unfortunately, the day after the giving of the presentation I fell victim to the flu. And did I fell bad. Anyway, that explains my lack of posting before Christmas. During Christmas I was busy working on a pet project and spending time with my significant other.
With the excuses out the way, I can begin on my presentation. All in all, the general feedback was pleasantly positive. I did a good job. I wanted to present my work from a manager’s point of perspective, that is, project management first, technology second. Of course, being a coder, I would love to ramble on about the awesomeness of my code, although I was still very happy to shape the presentation for the managers and, given the warm response, there is no doubt in my mind that I will do that again. The lesson here was: present to the intended audience.
I made sure to be in the room 15 minutes before to prepare everything: the laptop, the projector, where I was going to stand, firing the presentation on the laptop, etc. I even had time to get a cup of black so that I would look extra professional—I even wore a tie. I hit the presentation hard from the start. I had so much to say on each slide that I inherently missed something on every slide. Perhaps that’s a sign that there’s still room for improvement, that I can remember more and become more fluid. I should be able to give the same presentation twice, with almost the same information and style, but they will never be exactly the same.
So the presentation was great. Tomorrow is the start of a new day. Christmas holidays are over and it’s back to the day to day business.
Here’s to 2009 and the last 7 and a half months I have at Airbus.
As if webfaction wasn’t good enough to me already, I went ahead and joined with Slicehost. Slicehost offers a cheap VPS service. For $20 a month, you get 256 MB ram, 10 GB storage, and 100 GB bandwidth. Was there any reason to go with them? Nope. But what can I do when I am stuck at home with flu?
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As I near my fifth month at Airbus, I reflect on what I have achieved and accomplished at Filton. First, there were those unittests—and if it wasn’t for Django, I wouldn’t have had such an easy time going through those. I remember working with Django at around the same time as I was hacking those unittests. Second, I went over to France to give a training course. Yeah, right. I hardly knew my stuff back then. All I knew was how to fire up the IDE, download some code, and that’s really it. I gave a presentation on the unittests that I was doing (which I really enjoyed) and I talked to a developer who showed me the ways of Design Patterns. And now, I am working on porting a legacy application over to modern technology.
Right now, porting that application is my life.
This Thursday, I’ll have to share my enthusiasm and passion through a presentation. This presentation will be given to managers and developers. This presentation will show them what my colleagues have done for the past few years. In addition, it is a milestone of my life—I have been saying to myself how far I have come these 4 years.
So how far have I come?
Am I Nervous? Perhaps. Scared? No. I know what I have to do. It’s just a matter of doing it. I just have do it.
Let it be a good Thursday. And I will talk about it.