Work update

I had a quickie performance review with my boss Monday morning. Essentially, he feels that I'm doing fine, but admits that he hasn't been keeping a close eye on me, so he's not in a position to explain how he knows that I'm doing fine should anybody ask him.

We laid out a plan for continuing my COBOL studies. I'm going to run a series of meetings with my co-workers where I offer up some code that I've written and they critique it, offering alternate ways of accomplishing things and such. I'll use that venue to solicit ideas on where I should be concentrating my studies and continue writing code.

My day job has turned out to be commenting and documenting a piece of utility software that gets used several times a day by our developers, but nobody knows how it works except in the vaguest terms. The idea is that we're getting two birds with one stone: a critical piece of software is being documented, and I'm furthering my COBOL skills by studying someone else's code.

This utility comprises four files. The main driver is 5700 lines of code, although some of those lines are comments and blank lines. Nobody has touched it since 2001, and the last major revision seems to be in 1995. It originated in a mainframe environment, written in assembler, and has since been ported to three COBOL environments. My office mate and I accomplished the most recent COBOL port so that it runs under our current environment.

One of the most surprising moments during my performance review was when my boss referred to me as "self-actualized," which really isn't my picture of myself. I let it pass without comment, but I've been turning it over in my mind.

We're getting ready to release a revision of one of our software products, so our developer team conducted a couple of presentations yesterday for our education and customer support staff. I was asked to present a few changes, even though I didn't work on any of them. Another one of my co-workers worked up a little script for me, and I did some background research on the changes and reworked the script a bit. My segments yesterday went off without a hitch, and I got a couple of compliments from my co-workers.

Public speaking doesn't really upset me. The scariest part of this presentation was the feeling that I didn't know what I was talking about. I compensated by reminding myself that I've only been working here two months (already?) so nobody expects me to be a guru yet. I also compensated by studying the material and doing some research, mainly so I would feel more comfortable during the presentation, which is very important to success.

So I feel like I'm settling in here.

More work update

During the performance review, my boss also asked me to start holding regular meetings with my co-workers where I would present sections of code from the utility as I comment it. I mentioned that nobody knows how this thing works. I'm now the closest thing to an expert that we have. By disseminating my findings, we're spreading that knowledge around. When the code is completely commented and documented, I'll make a presentation to representatives from the other coding teams which also use this utility.

These meetings will also allow our team to evaluate the utility code and consider enhancements or changes. I know that there's at least one job that bombs unless we turn off some regular settings. I've already identified the section of code that's the culprit; one change is to expand the table that's being overrun so the job will run.

We're also switching to a new version control system for our code base and he wants this utility to be the first project to be checked in.

Twice now, I've sat through the class for the product that my team works on primarily. I've also attended a class that covers the basics of our industry. Now I'm expected to present what I've learned back to my co-workers, including the woman that taught the classes. This is to make sure that I'm familiar with the software. So I'm going to be running practice jobs and working on my presentation as well.

Soon, I'll start working on the code for this product, checking out bugs and correcting them. All of my code submissions will be reviewed, of course.