Current learning goals and MERN update

As of now, this is the end of my second week at TD, and I had a huge realization that I still had a lot of learning to go. Not only did I realize that the standard 7.5 work hours a day was not enough (mostly due to meetings), I don’t think it is practical to expect to get up to speed without putting in extra hours. However, it’s actually an exciting position to be in personally, because I do enjoy challenges and it’s slightly more lenient as well because of the holiday season coming up (and code freeze lol).

The current pivot is to spend more time actually getting myself up to speed with the new environments and technologies that the team is using, unfortunately taking some time away from my MERN stack endeavors. Hopefully, due to the notes that I took, it shouldn’t be that hard to context switch once I feel more comfortable at my current job. As of now, my current tickets include implementing a new environment (GitHub SaaS) into the onboarding application that I will be primarily focusing on. Once that’s taken care of, I was also assigned with a code cleanup, thus giving me an incentive to go through most of the source code and optimize/clean up certain things. This adds the requirement of getting used to working in AngularJS, NodeJS, and potentially NGRX.

All in all, exciting, interesting, and somewhat stressful time getting dropped into a slew of new technologies to work with, but at the same time I feel honoured because it seems like a trust exercise because I never had those technologies in my resume to begin with. Currently doing my best and minimizing other distractions in order to hit the floor running, and trusting the process.

End of my first week at TD!

My first week at TD was very inspiring and interesting to me, especially because I’ve previously worked at another competing bank. The onboarding process (although I’m not sure if you could even call it onboarding), felt smoother and more streamlined than what I’m used to, I think I got all of my software installed by the end of the 2nd day, and most of my VM set up by the 3rd and 4th. This is contrasted with my 2 weeks of scrambling and only getting the software up and running by the second week. I suppose it had to do with the whole cloud/devops theme, but it definitely feels more like a well-oiled machine than the previous adhoc (where everyone does a bit of everything and knows a bit of everything) that I was accustomed to in the past years.

In a sense, you could say that it felt a bit silo-ish, where because it seems more well defined, certain groups seemed to interact with their groups more than others. At the moment, hard to tell, but it was one of the things that were mentioned during one of the weekly group meetings. Siloing seemed to be a growing issue (to them, anyway), the more that the processes were streamlined, and it sort of makes sense in a way. When you don’t have to interact with as many people to deploy something and clear documentation is provided (with debugging notes), it does make sense that there is less of a need to exchange e-mails when everything is easily accessible and usable. I think that’s one of the shadows of DevOps in a way (at least from a noob perspective, at least that’s what it seems to me), but I do understand that it’s the cost of productivity. It makes sense that as pipelines get more and more refined, productivity goes up, requirements for long e-mail chains go down, and ultimately the feeling of siloing emerges at some point.

So far, I’m very pleased with my position so far the bank, it really does feel like a fresh of breath air and what my university self would’ve imagined being an engineer would be like. I have touched upon several technologies already that I’ve never previously worked with, as well as got some shadowing experience by watching over their work process, and learned a lot in the process. The only downside I can see so far is the sheer amount of meetings that I’ve been a part of, it’s quite daunting especially for the first week. I think in the 5 business days that I’ve been in, I’ve been in at least 20 hours of meetings. That’s greater than half of the expected work hour week when I don’t even fully understand the projects that I will be a part of! I feel like it’s a point worth noting because some of the seniors have even more meetings to be a part of, and I’m not entirely sure how they can get their work done without bleeding into pre/post work hours.

All in all, excited to be here, and it is definitely a pleasure and welcoming work environment to be a part of.