Blog

Hello,

I’m Kyle, the newest member of the team here at Antelle. I’ve been here for almost two months and have learned a lot.

After having my work station set up, I was given access to PluralSight so I could start acquainting myself with C#. I had learned Java in my university course and was already familiar with object-oriented programming principles, so it was mainly a matter of watching the video courses and keeping an eye out for the differences between Java and C#. Luckily, PluralSight is an excellent learning platform so it was fairly easy to familiarise myself with the new classes and the syntactical differences between the two programming languages.

It wasn’t long before Tony assigned me my first task, a console app which searches a txt file (or series of files) for a certain word, counts how many time the word occurs then logs the result to a new file. The user can specify what the word is, which file is being searched and where the results will be logged to. If a word is not specified, the program will count the total number of words in the file. While I had never worked on a project using C# before, this task didn’t require me to do much that I hadn’t done before in Java. I think it was good to start with a task that was fairly simple to get me used to C# and Visual Studio, before I start tackling concepts that are brand new to me.

After completing the first task and getting some helpful feedback from Sam, I was advised to start looking into APIs on PluralSight. Soon enough, I was given a task on the subject so I could get some practice with the subject. I had to design an API around estimations for how long different tasks would take. The data for this project was to be stored in a database. I had learned databases in university, but that was in a separate module to programming so this was my first time dealing with databases in my code. I had to write working GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests for all the different tables and also use some of the formulae Sam had written to perform tasks such as calculating an estimate for a project or calculating an employee’s estimation accuracy.

This project certainly taught me a lot. It involved a lot of material I didn’t know before, which was a little daunting, but it was reassuring to know that Sam was willing to walk me through some of the concepts I didn’t grasp at first.

Now here we are and I’m using PluralSight to throw myself into another topic: SharePoint. There is clearly a lot for me to learn in this job, but I feel up for the challenge, making it my goal every day to be a better developer than I was yesterday. It’ll be a challenge but I’m surrounded by talented and helpful people, so with some hard work I believe I can succeed at Antelle.

Until next time