Today wasn’t too much fun, but I did finally get to see how things work at the new job. Another developer is right out of college and was given a lot of easy defects to fix. They were things like typos and text changes.

We spent most of the day pairing since he’s not too familiar with the code, and I have no idea how the process works here. From what I saw, I wasn’t too impressed.

First, the whole developer environment isn’t very well put together. Everyone shares a common database, so if one person screws it up, it brings it down for all of us.

Second, the version of the code editor they use is outdated by several versions, and that keeps plugins and tools from working correctly. To get around that, they add in a lot of manual steps.

Third, their build and deploy process is extremely slow. Previously, we did 3 builds a day. Here, they do 3 a week. It keeps things moving really slowly since changes made right after the build won’t be available for testing until the next build that’s 2 days away.

Finally, the tickets we work on aren’t real clear on what is needed. There are paragraphs of text explaining situations when the issue is there is a word misspelled. It’s far harder to figure out what is needed than it is to actually do the work.

Overall, I don’t really like it. I think I will start looking into ways of making my local environment a little better, but the shared database will still be an issue.

As far as making money, today I didn’t really do anything. It was just client work.