Somehow it's been 3 months into my first dev job and it feels like I've only been at work for 3 weeks! I had my 3 month probation talk, spoiler alert - they are happy with the service and would like to continue with the current arrangements!
This week, I've been involved with a couple of tickets, mostly styling and UI updates. In our sprint retro, we had a good discussion on what went well, what didn't and things we should try or continue with into the next sprint. I think these reflective talks are so important in laying out the pain points and being honest with each team member about the work process. We came out of the meeting with notes on how to time manage better in and around meetings, how to deal with content editors and responsibilities around content creation. On top of that, we have some interesting topics to research for the next sprint.
Meetings seem to draw a lot of mental bandwidth each day and it is encumbering our two senior staff. We are going to try and distribute some of the regular meetings amongst junior staff. Even though this will take away from development time, I think it will be ok as I need some management and collaboration experience anyway for my apprenticeship assessment. Plus, it gives me a good opportunity to get to know other team members that perhaps I wouldn't speak to otherwise.
I experienced another mistake I have repeated which was frustrating. Recently, I notice when switching branches and working on my local env, some unrelated tracked files piling up when I am running git commands in CLI or VS code. I stayed silent until this week because I thought that they were somehow someone else's changes that were being tracked in the remote repo! Each time I'd go for a commit, I would discard these other files but they would return whenever I switched branch. The reason was that I haven't been running git merge develop after: git checkout develop ; git pull; git checkout <your branch>
Since I got help from my senior colleague, I reverted to our Notion docs (she wrote the doc on back merge which I have seen a few times!) and updated my git flow doc accordingly. Lesson learned? Only time will tell...
I had a quarterly apprenticeship progress review meeting to keep the training admin staff up to speed on how things are going. As the sessions have been progressing, it is dawning on me the amount of reporting work I have to do for the end point assessment but at least things are becoming more clear. I've taken an early stab at the reports (I'm already 1/8 of the way through the apprenticeship) with justification of skills obtained: code snippets I've used or written; screenshots of processes; and evidence of communication / planning (emails, messages, code review comments). There's still a lot to cover as I need to show that I've touched on all aspects of the SDLC within our workplace.
We are nearly three months into the organisation's annual flagship event. I am told the pressure will ramp up soon and the workload will follow suit. I am not really sure what to expect, but I'm confident- this I hope is where having prior experience in a work environment around key delivery deadlines will be beneficial! I'm looking forward to it!