Ok. This is really fucking hard.

July 2016 · 3 minute read

I’m actually questioning whether I can do this for a job. It is honestly that difficult and I have no idea what’s going on. I feel like I’ve been sitting here for two days looking through loops of code that have now just blurred into a mash-up of numbers and letters in files that seem to have no particular order and I’m so confused and I don’t want hassle everyone in the office cause I know they’re really busy and all I want to do is cry!

Week 2 and I have my first project! This is what I’ve been anticipating since I got here, waiting for the opportunity to get really stuck in with some actual work.

I need help for the first two days setting up the environment and getting everything ready for development on my local machine. It seems overly complicated and everyone uses GUIs for everything, including the database. It’s weird not having to search through tables in the command line but I guess we’re going for efficiency here…

Finally, with everything up and running and its time to get going with some new features in this project that someone else originally wrote and… blank.

I have no idea whats going on, the code is so confusing. Thank god the dev assigned to help me wrote a lot of it – although it was so long ago that he still needs to search through it too.

I feel quite overwhelmed and a little stupid that I can’t seem to work out the basics, though I suppose if I wrote the code in the first place I would have a significantly better understanding of what was going.

This is the first time I’ve really had to work on someone else code so really, I probably should have been more realistic about how difficult it would be to decipher. Never mind that it was written in an old framework and largely hasn’t been maintained…

I suppose it’s a good first project but man, it’s frustrating not being able to just do the job. And then whenever the other devs help they’re just like bam bam bam and it’s done and I’m sitting there like wtf, I missed all of that…

At least I’m starting to nail the keyboard shortcuts a little better to make it faster switching between everything. I mean, after all, I can at the very least attempt to not look as amateur as I am…

One week into the project and I’ve managed to finish a couple of small parts of the #todos but man, at this rate, I don’t know how far I’m going to get by the end of the month. I feel like what I’ve done so far should have only taken two days. I wish I knew what the expectations were. Now I find myself stressing out about not performing well enough instead of focussing on the job.

Ahh well, I guess I can only do so much. Some progress is better than none!

Perhaps my side project, for the time being, can be to improve my PHP skills. I’ve found a number of online tutorials which would most likely benefit me in a massive way. I don’t want to do those during company time though, if I have real tasks to complete. And to be honest, after this week, I can’t be fucked.