Blog

The 4th September came around, and I entered the doors of Antelle to be greeted by Tony, who proceeded to show me around the office, especially the tea and coffee area and my workspace. Following this brief introduction, he took me into his office and told me the broad plan for my time here, as well as my first week’s task.

Once he had finished explaining matters I was pointed to my desk and let loose upon Antelle’s systems, a worrying prospect when I think that before arriving here, I had barely any experience of coding or programming, just a few sessions on Codecademy. After watching some video’s on Pluralsight and looking at HTML and CSS examples around the web, I was ready to dip my toes into the Digital signage task I was asked to create as my first week’s project. Well when I say dip my toes, I mean to throw myself into the deep end and immediately run into problems. 

For the first few days, most of my time was hunting for solutions and if/when that failed looking to Sam and Ben for their aid, which thankfully they seemed happy to give. Slowly a working project began to take shape, though basic it at least worked as intended, despite the many stumbling blocks set in my path by my desire to make something beautiful.

Come 4 pm Monday 11th, and my project is submitted for code review by Sam. After that, a quiet period of further study and Pluralsight was undertaken, as well as college Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday dawns, and I enter the boardroom for my first code review like a man walking to the gallows, sure in the knowledge that I was about to be informed just how disappointing and broken my project's code was.

Surprisingly it was not too bad, of course, I had made mistakes but the project worked, and there was nothing majorly wrong with its functionality.

With the code review behind me, and the lessons given firmly in hand I now go forth into the still mostly unknown world of coding and programming, I’m determined to succeed and make something of my time here and the investment the company and others have made.

Joshua