Last day at work

It's my last day at SchoolSoft (now DreamBox Learning). I've really enjoyed it and learned a lot about working in a development team too (as well as making almost $5000, unfortunately somewhat less because of income tax). They also gave me a great letter of recommendation for my next job (which will probably be at DreamBox again next summer).

Everyone who asks me about my job is always impressed by how much money I make, but honestly, to me that's just a bonus — working there was worth so much more to me than just money.

My office

Here are some pictures of my office:

Dual monitors

I got a second monitor at work, and now I get to experience the awesomeness of two monitors! They really do improve productivity for programming.

I use the first one (my laptop's built in screen, 1920x1200, 17") for primary development (that is, actually writing code) and the second one (1280x1024, 17") for debugging/testing and reading documentation. Maybe I can get a third monitor* for reading Slashdot! :) Maybe I'll post a picture of my office.

*A third one probably wouldn't actually work because my laptop only has one graphics card. So unless I can get my hands on one of those external monitor-joining boxes, I'm limited to two.

Gravitating away from UI programming

Today I did my first non-UI assignment at SchoolSoft (did I mention that it's now called DreamBox?). It was a generator, a class that generates numbers (or other kinds of data) for the client-side application. For example, when asking the kid to compare different numbers, the generator provides those numbers. It seems easy but there's actually some complexity: if the kid is doing badly, the generator might have to "adapt" and make things easier. Sometimes the teachers (yeah, we have professional teachers on staff) want the questions to come in a certain order or something. So the person who makes the generator has to find algorithms for how to make the correct sequence of numbers. It's pretty fun, especially compared to the frustration of UI programming.

I get paid a lot!

This week I get paid, and it's a lot! About $550 on most weeks (although last week I was on vacation for three days) (it's not $15/hr * 8hr * 5day because I don't work 8 hours a day, more like 7.5. Eight hours is the maximum I'm allowed to work, actually). Not bad for a job doing something I would have done at home anyway :)

Programming fatigue

I've noticed a trend: I come into work around 9:30 and get a lot done. Often I postpone/skip lunch because I'm programming. But around 2:00, I start to get uncharacteristically tired of programming and stop doing as much work. I guess there's something to be said for breaks :)

Fourth day

Things are looking good! I got a large project done way ahead of time (can't give any screenshots because I signed an NDA). I'm getting a feel for their coding style and stuff too.

There are lots of meetings on Mondays apparently, but almost none the rest of the week. Also, I'm legally required to take a 15-minute break every two hours since I'm a teen worker, so Nigel (my manager) keeps (half-jokingly) bugging me to take a break.

I've asked around and if I want to, I can switch to doing server-side programming in Ruby anytime I want to. I might do that after a month, so that I'll have spent half my time with the Flash frontend and half with the Ruby backend.

So yeah, it's pretty fun now, and I get paid to program!

Second day

Got a relatively complex assignment today. In most languages I could do it easily, but the combination of ActionScript/Flash/Flex's suckiness and the horrible Flex IDE, it's actually quite hard.

Seems like ActionScript is a blend of Java and Visual Basic. Java is a relatively OK language, but Visual Basic — ugh! For example, instead of declaring variables with the type first, then the name ("int foo"), ActionScript displays its braindeadness by using this: "var foo:int". Doesn't seem too bad, right? Well it is if you have to do it a lot.

Another area where ActionScript is almost as bad as a language like J# is documentation. There is a real lack of documentation available online, especially things like community discussions on how to do a certain task. This is probably either because most Flash developers are artists and so don't use ActionScript much, or because the whole Flash platform is proprietary.

Anyway, hopefully I'll start to like Flex more after I read some of the books I got on it. Unfortunately, struggling with Flex for 8 hours a day doesn't leave me too eager to read books on it after I come home.

First day at work

Not much time to blog, but I'll give you a brief summary of my first day at work. SchoolSoft's codebase is really big and hard to understand. The inheritance hierarchy is very complex, almost nothing is formally documented, and it doesn't help that the Flex IDE is rather poor. On the positive side, I like version control (they use SVN). I exceeded expectations and made two tools.

So overall, I'm finding working in a real job environment to be mostly fun, although there is considerably more bureaucracy and "red tape" than solo coding or even what we did in Hunt the Wumpus.