Ahhh, the smell of something to actually start working on!
This week has been full of ups and downs, strongly correlated with how much I feel like I'm understanding the things that I'm learning. There are peaks of a near euphoria as a couple of neurons fire simultaneously and a flash of insight occurs. It's like sifting through a box of puzzle pieces and just happening to stumble across two pieces that fit together. Then there are the low valleys where it seems that I will never, ever understand what the heck is going on. This has been extremely frustrating .. like sifting through those puzzle pieces and realizing that there's actually no picture on either side. The good news is that I'm making steady progress and some of that is behind me now and I feel somewhat confident with some of the terms and concepts that get used here in daily conversation.
And that shaky level of confidence now means that I'm actually ready to contemplate contributing something useful to this company, which is exciting and daunting all at once. It looks like I'm going to be looking into creating a software workflow tool to automate what is now an intensive manual process of messing around with files on the file system. The good news is that there are a couple of existing applications that I will just be modifying, which keeps the scope of the work down and allows me to get familiar with code that's already written. But I will also be starting some new modules that will hopefully be the start of a new software framework, written in Java, that is used all over the place. I've written up the design document and will hopefully get started cutting some code on
