Personal Blog 1

The first week of QA training has been a fun and interesting start to my first proper job. Living way out in Stretford I have had to be getting up as early as 6.45am in order to get ready and walk in to the offices. This is a significant change to the student lifestyle of barely getting up at all most days. In spite of this initial challenge the walks have proven highly productive in allowing me to get through a large back catalog of assorted podcasts. I have also found walking in to be a better way of waking up in the morning than the standard cup of coffee which more often than not leads to me crashing by about 11 so being less than optimal from a productivity perspective.

Whilst the early morning feel like a departure from student life I have found myself thinking of much of the work being more reminiscent of the past three years of my life. We started with Java rather than enterprise architecture unlike most of the trainees here, and the first week has been spent observing lectures and working through Java tasks. This has proven to be fairly easy going and actually quite enjoyable. Being someone who loves logic puzzles I felt very at home working out how to achieve various tasks through assorted programming techniques. It felt a lot like the programming lectures at university but on a much faster timeline. I feel like I learned more about Java in the first day at QA than I had in a three month long course in C++. So a week in I feel like I can program anything.

The most notable event  in the week was of course the Friday evening social time. Where I expected a single beer to be handed out to each person as a fairly token gesture and for people to be heading home by about 5.30. This proved to be far from the case. Everyone who attended was really friendly and I had a great time whittling away the hours chatting to people from all the trainee groups and also the permanent academy staff. One of the most amusing things I have found about interacting with the other groups around QA is how much more experienced they seem than myself and my fellow group mates. You can always tell who has been here longer which is interesting given there is only a month between the groups and yet they feel as far ahead as third years seem to freshers in the first week at university. They are all incredibly supportive and informative as well, I look forward to continuing the incredible pace of learning that this course appears to offer throughout the coming weeks.

Week two began with a flying start when I was so enthusiastic I turned up to work an hour early, forgetting that on Mondays we start at 10 rather than 9. So after an hour spent in the local coffee shop with a few other over-enthusiastic trainees I was ready to start working on Dev-Ops and continuous integration which is more interesting than the name suggests, although that is not particularly difficult. So after a few more lectures and a lot of typing commands and then retyping them with “sudo” at the start, I continue to feel high spirited about the coming months of training.