My Placement Year

Back in July 2012, I began my first proper paid job as a Student Software Engineer.  I was fresh out of my second year at university and had just finished moving into my own flat.  I wasn't completely alone at work though as a university friend was also starting his placement year there too.

I was going in knowing very little about Object Oriented Programming and not remembering much from what I had learned at university at all.  Luckily I wasn't thrown completely in the deep end and my first couple of fixes were just changing a couple of strings.

Then I got elbow deep in some WinAPI to prevent users from changing the name of a file or folder by left-clicking twice.  At first I thought it was impossible, but by playing around with the system styles and some switch statements I managed to get it to work, along with enabling F2 and right-click->rename to rename the them.

Not long after I started, though, I had to take a couple of months off for what was later diagnosed as Crohn's Disease.  I missed a great chunk of learning in those two months, and always worried about whether I'd have a job to come back to.

I came back and was swapped with my friend from development to testing.  I had only learned some Java and C++ at university, and in my first year too, so being told all of the tests were written in C# was a bit of a shock, but it didn't deter me.  I created many a coded UI test and maintained them in the three months I was on testing.  There wasn't much to testing.

I swapped with my friend again back into development and was put onto the new development project.  The new development was written in C#, like the tests, so I had a little background knowledge of how it all worked.  Along with C#, I had to learn the WPF subsystem and MVVM architecture.  Oh boy.  I didn't learn all of the aspects of it, just enough to get me through the issues.  I dove straight into the deep end of WPF and went about learning to validate text using IDataErrorInfo.  After much searching of the internet and reading of books, I found an answer both the lead developer and I were happy with.

I realised while coding for the new development how important Unit Tests are for a program.

Along with writing code for the new development, I became a whiz at creating UIs with XAML.  I was also given free reign to create an icon for the program, but unfortunately none of my creations were chosen.

Now I'm back in testing, waiting for my tests to finish.  I think I definitely prefer development over testing, but I can appreciate the importance of testing for programs.