Well the first day was pretty overwhelming for me, I have to say. But yesterday, with a fresh start and about 4 espressos (thanks to the espresso machine in the next cube), I felt a resurgence of my faculties and my ability to actually learn something new. I think my brain had just reached its saturation point and I needed a night to digest what I'd learned so that I could start over again.
One of my colleagues, whose background is in Computer Science but who has been in the molecular biology field for some time, lent me this book that looks to be a very good introduction to the field in which I'll be working. It's especially nice for me because, well, there's a monkey on the cover and lots of goofy little cartoons in the book along with chemical compounds and all sorts of other notation that is new to me. I read about 5 chapters last night and what's really funny is that I actually remember a lot of this stuff as I am reading it. It's been buried deep in the sediment of my brain and is getting dusted off a bit.
Additionally, I actually got to start looking at code yesterday and will be doing so more today. I'm excited to actually start looking at what we have right now and what we're going to need to build/re-build. I'm excited because it sounds like my first project may be building some common database access routines in Java and using those to take some prepared data from the file system, parse it, and put it in the database. Talk about something familiar!
So, I'm feeling quite good today (1 espresso already). I have to find out if anyone cares if I reinstall this computer I'm on ... it's got quite a bit of crap on it from the guy that was here previously and I like to start with a clean slate. So, in comparison to my old job, here there's a +1 for not having to construct my own desk but a -1 for not having a tip-top-of-the-line machine cleanly installed for my use. That's okay, I love reinstalling systems.
