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"Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow."

Plato


First 1.5 month in MOL

Created on Sunday, 22 July 2007
Edited on Thursday, 26 July 2007

Blessing
Thank God for his blessing to my career. First of all, for giving me a good senior. He is helpful. He always responded when I asked him for help. He has helped me in many way, like to fix the bug and gave me many advices and sharing his experiences about software development. Indeed, I learnt a lot from him.

I am thankful to be given a chance to handle one big part of the project. Even though, this project does not require me to build one from zero because there was an existing system already. This project I'm handling requires me to "re-customize" it. Nevertheless, I'm grateful about it especially when I recall back my support job function in my previous job.

During these moment, I also want to thank Bill Wilkinson from http://www.aspmessageboard.com/. He has helped to fix a lot of stuff all these years especially in Classic ASP. He really gave his heart to help people and his respond was so quick that it is as if I was chatting with him. If I have a chance to meet up, I want to thank him face to face and treat him a good meal to show my appreciation to him all these years.

The module I am doing now is a Customer Care module. When one day, I reflected upon it, I felt so encouraged because my previous company is mainly doing CRM system (Customer Care System and CRM System are the same, just different term). In fact, they are the leader in CRM. Even though, it was just a short period (three months plus) working in Entellium, that duration gave me an idea how world class standard of a CRM looks like. This helps a lot in design my current project. I can make use of previous job's experience and knowledge. I think it is rare to have your previous job's experience related to the current one. In fact, both also done in Classic ASP. And I don't know about it until I joined this company!

Presentation and Stress
On 17 July 2007, few of us went to our client to present the system we have developed so far. The presentation was done by by both my manager and my senior. I felt some stress since I knew about that, but the stress increased on that actual day, especially during the presentation. I felt anxious and worry that the system will hit critical bug during the presentation. But, thank God, the presentation went quite smoothly, thought my senior and I notice a minor bug. I felt so relieved after that. The thing is over here, we do not have a QA or Testing team just like the previous company. And, I realize that it is not that easily to thoroughly test the system because there are too many combinations, if I perform a very complete testing. And, I do not have a lot testing techniques. I believe knowing that testing techniques, will able to test the system effectively.

Challenges I forsee
Up to now, I have one focus in mainly one module and there are a few more to go. What I forsee is there are a lot of tough times I need to go through. I see myself having much hard time to learn ASP.NET / VB.NET. The module I'm doing now is done with classic ASP, while the rest of the module is expected to be done with VB.NET and I am very new to VB.NET. In fact, I have never done any application with it. I think by the end of my probation, things are easier for me. Hope and pray that I can survive until that time. I started to feel very tired of working for this project at this time.

I also forsee that problem of support and maintenance for both Classic ASP and ASP.NET 1.1. Pretty scary when think about it. Hopefully, I don't have encounter much problems from these two friends.