Sankofa

Last Friday was my 120th day at work. August 7, 2009 was the day that I officially became a permanent part of the workforce. I am now a “regular”, full-pledged, software developer. Society has decided to accept me into the “real world”. People from this part of the world will now start to refer to me as an “adult” despite my bubbly, child-like disposition.

6 Months of Corporate Citizenry

For those who are not acquainted with the Philippine’s Labor System, let me put you up to speed with the “regularization” process. When a new employee enters a company, there is a six-month “getting-to-know” period wherein the employer will closely observe the employee’s job performance and base on that performance, the employer would decide whether to keep the employee as a “regular” employee or not (Fired). During that “getting-to-know” period, you as an “irregular/probationary” employee, are not entitled with some benefits like full medical benefits, perfect attendance bonus, etc.

Somehow, the people who are responsible for monitoring my job performance thought that the performance I have shown for the last six months is acceptable and have decided to promote me to a regular employee.

During the past six months, I have experienced a lot of new, exciting things. Like learning a new programming language, approaching random girls at some public place and consuming alcoholic beverages. I can’t say that all of them are geeky experiences, but hey, its part of being human.

Listed below are things that I have experienced during the past six months (this is not a complete list of what transpired for the last six months):

• Worked on four separate projects
• Started a blog about software development
• Learned COM
• Worked on a Localization project
• Migrated a product to work on Vista
• Drank Zombie
• Asked the digits of a totally random chick
• Worked with bit patterns
• Discovered that Javascript doesn’t support internationalization (Russian dates)
• Learned Impersonation (and the basics of Windows Security)
• Consumed Alcopops
• Written a blog post about nationalism and got flamed
• Attended a Leadership Conference
• Received an award for delivering a product on time
• Bought a shoe with my own money
• Hated DateTime parsing on .NET
• Partially learned AJAX and JSON
• Maintained and supported three products
• Created and documented a new build process
• Discovered SNSD
• Dined at really expensive restaurants
• Wore a suit
• Felt the pain of migrating .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0
• Debugged a 25 line SELECT statement (with 5 joins)
• Coding Horror
• Got really pissed with an officemate
• Admired the technical knowledge of my superiors
• Treated the entire team to a Pizza
• Jogged 2 kilometers at a real outdoor red urethane track
• Talked to a Microsoft representative
• Coordinated with testers to resolve an issue with our product
• Paid Taxes
• Joined a fan club
• Had a Flu Shot
• Discovered that my bone density is uber low
• Wore eyeglasses
• Was astonished at how big corporations work (Changing a splash screen image needed the approval of a bunch of people)
• Appreciated my work environment
• Learned Windows Communication Framework
• Worked with SVG graphs (and discovered that Visual Studio 2005 and Adobe SVG Viewer hates each other)
• Had someone tell me that I lack professionalism
• Broke a daily build
• Really understood what text encoding is all about
• Discovered that the real world is full of mediocrity
• Experienced integration hell
• Surprised that most software developers doesn’t follow best practices for Localization support
• Studied MFC
• Understood the meaning of Teamwork

Most of these experiences are not possible without the help and encouragement of my teammates (especially the Zombie one!). So I would like to thank my team (you know who you guys are) for being such great geek buddies and for actually teaching me a few stuff about life. We may not agree on some topics (SNSD vs Wondergirls, Gravity, Time Management, Filipino Culture, etc), but I am damn sure that we had a lot of fun debating. Seriously, thanks!

Looking forward to a great year (and career) ahead!