OK. I’m going to try tonight’s post a little before bed and thus without a crying baby or one that simply wants to be included in the post. Hopefully, this one will read a little better.
Today was a cool day on a few accounts. I started out by practicing coin changer again—I’ve got it down pretty well, I’m just trying to get it to flow a little better now.
Then I sat in my stand up meeting. That was both fun and informative today as we’ve been invited to open & represent CCs Studio in a pretty major and far reaching webinar coming up next week. I got to join in on the discussions on how we want to go about doing this and other details. My experience here was two fold. First of all, it was very interesting to not only watch the team work together to come up with a plan of action, but to also interact within this small private company to help make the best decisions. Remember, I come from a corporate background where all managers were told to be entrepreneurial within our department and treat it like our own business, but within a corporate setting, i see now what I think I always knew that that is just not really possible–there’s so much more risk yet also creativity & ownership when the big company isn’t both acting as both your audience & your sponsor.
So for me, it is very interesting to be on this other side of the fence working with a team that is trying to grow a branded seedling. I really liked how they worked together, that they supported each other, and that each of them had a lot of confidence and conviction in their ideas. In time, i suppose, I will both gain confidence as I get to know the team more to speak up with my own ideas as well as get google chat to ping me when they are having an impromptu meeting so that I don’t miss those opportunities to do so.
I’m still in the absorption phase of my new job—just kind of watching the team to get a feel for their culture and see where & how i can fit in aside from just learning. I think i will be good at this in the end, but working with a brand new team is always a little intimidating as is. Then throw in that I technically don’t really have any qualifications as a developer yet and that I have to get to know this team virtually; well, it’s a little different—granted, I did lead my grad-school teams virtually, and even made virtual friends with other students who I’ve never actually met. So I’ve done this before, and I should come out ok. I just need to calibrate a little bit and then loosen up and lose the nerves.
After that I wrote a networking email. If you recall a couple weeks ago, I reached out to an acquaintance that I’ve known for nearly a decade through my beer club. He got back to me yesterday with the email address of someone he thinks would probably be a good contact for me. Apparently he put a good deal of thought into it and even asked around. I was both impressed and super appreciative that it put that kind of effort into helping me. I heard back from the guy within a couple hours with a pretty in depth email on topics to look into as well as an agreement to virtually meet with me next week, so I’m going to set that up for Tuesday maybe and have a coding friend :)
I finished out the day working on ttt. I wish I could show more tangible progress, but the truth of the matter is that I think I’m actually still making really good progress. It’s been kind of fun and certainly interesting ‘watching’ myself tear apart this game and not break it as I try to put it back together in a different more general way. It will be very interesting to compare the final product to the initial iteration of the project.