Author: ryanfitzpatrick25@outlook.com

In my second week things started to pick up some more. I’m starting to get more appointments which is nice, and class time is starting to become more about teaching and helping the students as the semester gets under way. We also have these weekly study sessions where any group of students can come to class run by myself and i’ll teach them material or help them with any questions they have. Apparently these die down later in the semester but this week they were very packed which was cool and exciting. Besides the appointments and class time students can also come to drop-in sessions with us for quick questions, however being the start of the semester and since they don’t have any assignments coming up, these have been very dead. Most of my work so far has been helping students get setup as well as a lot of review, but it’s been fun.

My first week at Sheridan was pretty uneventful. I had a training session last Wednesday which was pretty basic, and obviously in the first week people don’t really require that much help in the first week. My work consisted mostly of extra training here and there, as well as getting used to the new setting and the new title. Being a learning assistant is very different to my previous terms at Canadian Tire, and I do miss the regular programming, but I feel that I’m going to like teaching as well and it’s going to be great for my communication skills. The other learning assistants seem pretty cool too which is nice. I only had a couple of appointments this week and class time was spent mostly introducing myself and the learning center. Overall it was a good first week.

My last week. I can honestly say that once again I thoroughly enjoyed my term here. Going in I had the goals to take more responsibility, improve my communication skills, and learn as much as possible about software development. I think I’ve achieved all of these goals, specifically in regards to responsibility and communication. Being a returnee I was given all the responsibility I wanted and was able to successful even with the new paradigm which I’m really proud. And I think I was able to voice my concerns, give ideas, and propose solutions any time I needed to which is very important to me and a very important skill set. Not much happened work wise except for release 2 of the template being released, and bug fixes for TPS. A lot of the team said they were sad to see me go and I am sad to leave, I had lots of fun these past 4 months; I just wish it was longer.

There has been several bugs in TPS for me to work. They’re all very simple to track and fix but it still keeps me busy. Our main problem now is fixing the views which are still very slow and the business is finding it hard to test because of this. I finished my grid design this week and even implemented in using the template in MVC which was cool; I haven’t worked with MVC in years and it was nice to get some coding done on this project.

Internal testing for TPS is done now. We are now opening the floor to the business for data testing so in reality the bug fixing has just begun. Our application is much faster now though which is awesome. If I’m being honest though I’m disappointed that I’m missing another release of TPS; 4 months is just too short I guess. Not much to report on the template front.

Developer testing is almost done for TPS, however the remaining bugs are turning out to be quite difficult and require a lot of design and redesign. Work has also begun for release 2 of the template and it mainly revolves around user controls now. My job is to mock up a grid view design. Vacation is over; back to work.

I went on vacation this week. It was a family trip to Newfoundland for a big reunion. It was awesome and I really enjoyed myself and everyone had a blast. Nothing to report work wise however.

Finished my Angular app and presentation and I have to say I really enjoy working with Angular. I got some really good feedback about my presentation and I really feel like my communication skills have improved immensely. We also presented the template to the team which went well. For TPS we decided on how we would analyze data, basically instead of trying to pull and recreate the data based on execution and revision data, we would instead mark freight moves to be analyzed while importing our source data. To be honest I thought that’s what we were going to do anyways. It’s nice when things work out.

The template was finished this week which is good. I did a lot of work on documentation; both about the overall design and purpose and how to use the templates as well. Most of the TPS bugs seem to be about us not considering deleted or inactive data which just means we didn’t realize how big of a change this would be, but we’re working hard and fixing a lot of issues. I had one issue involving something called MyTR records, which is the main data source for weight and cube and other specific information. Basically records would be modified in our data source, causing to pull multiples and assume somethings wrong. We didn’t know this situation even happened so that was interesting, an easy fix though but really annoying to find. We all need to be more aware of how our underlying data sources actually function.

Slow week this week. Some extra changes to the template mainly with style and how we use it. In it’s current state all it is is a master page UI with very basic functionality. We discussed the next release which will include common controls. TPS was more testing and design. And I didn’t get much done with angular. My presentation was pushed back a couple weeks so everyone can attend; scheduling is kind of hectic since everyone is going on vacation, and everyone seems to be getting sick. Also the template presentation was moved to the same day as my angular presentation.