a. Wednesday:
i. First
day at Alpha Tech. Get there 8:30, wait for a bit in the lobby, then a safety
orientation. Nothing that can really hurt me in the engineering cubicles :P
ii. Meet
the dude I’m working with, a rising senior at Western named Ross. He’s super
excited to be working at a real software company, which is good, but I think he
might be prone to uncritically accept some of Alpha’s weirder, more corporate
practices.
iii. Ross
shows me a bit of what he’s been working on—he’s been there a week, but still
doesn’t seem to have a super crisp idea of what’s going on. Don’t get me
wrong—the guy is competent—but it’s a confusing environment J
iv. Mike
Koepp, Heidi’s dad, who is (awesomely) supervising us, then tries to give me a
very brief overview of what I’m doing. Then he hits me with 400 pages of
technical manuals, coding standards, etc. J
v. Some
of the manuals are relevant, some not—it takes me a bunch of scraping before I
manage to figure out we’re only working on the transponder component of the
power supply.
vi. Manage
to catch Mike for a tour of the labs where the actual devices are tested. Get
some big-picture stuff about the device which I’ll probably never use but I
ought to know.
vii. Keep
reading, looking at bash scripts with Ross. I guess I have some idea? What’s
going on…
viii.
Big picture what we’re doing: automating the
build-deploy-test process for two firmware codebases running on a diagnostics
transponder in Alpha’s main product, a cable power supply. Little picture what
we’re doing (at least until I figure out the better way that obviously exists):
hand-altering directory names in a bunch of bash build/make scripts.
ix. Get
picked up for Park Day! Serious triumphant return. Everyone runs over, lots of
hugs and high fives. Make a solid effort to learn the names of the new little
kids.
x. We
play Banana Flag, which, if you don’t know, is a cross between Capture the Flag
and finger fencing (aka Banana Tag). Great game. I’m gasping and winded at the
end of it J
xi. Continue
with Flyers Up. I crush everyone pretty solidly at that, at least until they
get annoyed enough to start working at it :P Blow a hole in the side of my
shoe.
xii. Once
that dies out, end up playing touch football with a tenacious little dude named
Caleb, Simian, and a random non-PD fellow. Finish out the day by shinnying
halfway up a thick pine tree, which I never used to be able to do (pushups
FTW!) and then getting squashed by Summer and Lucas and Summer’s dog.
xiii.
Take Lucas and his mom Michelle home, then we go
home ourselves.
xiv. Aand
I honestly don’t remember what happened after that—a haze of playing with
secret, food, watching goofy videos with Izzy and Dad… Oh! I start teaching
myself guitar—find this website called JamPlay. Then we watch half of this
movie called Brooklyn.
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