Wednesday 14 September 2016

The first week and a half at QA Consulting has gone quite well. I have made new friends and learned new things.

The first week was focused mainly on Java, and while I had done projects in this language before, I only ran the program through the command prompt. Using and learning Eclipse was a new and fortuitous occurrence, for I was able to quickly adjust to the ease in which a class file could be compiled and ran. The syntax highlighting and auto-complete commands were also new and highly useful. With the help of these, I quickly re-learned what I already knew of Java and had the first four tasks done within the first day.

But then came the problem, although I had done work with Java before, I had not delved much into using multiple classes. While the concepts are familiar to me, the implementation was not. The topic was broached only briefly during my learning, and practiced a small amount, but not significantly. As such, I had some trouble with task 5, which involved creating multiple classes and objects which would all interact with each other.

After a couple of days of scouring the internet for information and examples, I became more accustomed to the use of objects, and when it was announced on Thursday that we were to have a test the following day, I felt confident that I could employ the use of these methods that the test was sure to contain.

And indeed, come Friday I was able to create a program that while inchoate, was functional to the point that I had made it. The only aspect that caused my final project to be incomplete and non-functioning was the lack of time permitted to the task. I worked with barely a pause and yet only achieved perhaps a 50% completion.

During the second week we started to learn about DevOps, in which I had no prior knowledge. To start with, we had to look up the uses of various software and create a Pipeline diagram for a generic system. We were then tasked with creating an Ubuntu system using a program called vagrant that assists in the installation. I found these tasks to be fairly easy.

The second day consisted of creating a CentOS virtual machine without the aid of any programs such as Vagrant. I found this task to be relatively simple and did not have much trouble with it. We then used the terminal to do a myriad of tasks, including making folders and files, and generating a new admin user.

The next day involved installing and running programs. This was a bit tricky as the files first had to be sent to the virtual machine, and then installed via the console, for which we used PuTTy. The programs were all new to me, but after some perseverance, googling, and asking my neighbours, I managed to finish all the tasks.

We have been told that on Thursday we are to start a project which will carry through to Friday, and that we get to finish at lunch time on said Friday!

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