Hired for our tech skills

 Mile long path to a folder. 

Cut & paste it into email... 

And because the very last folder has a space between the words, rather than a _, which is what the 10 other folders have, it fails to work, and I have to manually edit the link.

And we were all hired for our tech skills.

31 character limit

Making something for work, a nice simple situation of reading all xlsx files in a folder and moving the data to a tab in a single xlsx file. Easy peesy. 

30 mins later I run it the first time. It ran, but was giving me "Excel found errors, but can recover the data". Data all looked good, except every tab after the first was named "Recovered #". 

2hrs of work, with lots of long walks, and off the clock research, later, I discovered that the issue is the file names that I am trying to use for the tab names are longer than 31 characters, and the first 31 characters are the same.  OK, the first 39 characters are the same, and then there are 10 more at the end that match. These file names are insanely long. 

So I set up a simple replace to remove everything that is duplicate data in the names, and it all works! The issue was in excel, not my code. I went so far as to try writing the data to a csv, and then to the final excel file to see if there was some weird characters or formatting setting it off, before I wondered if there is a limit to the size of an Excel sheet name.

Naming conventions are important

People not following naming conventions is going to drive me insane. 

Xxxx_xxx_dddd is not the same as Xxxx_xxx-dddd.

Ok, so check if char 8 is... No wait, just get rid if char 8... Xxxx_xxxdddd doesn't care if there used to be a - or a _ there.

Ok, thanks for helping me figure out how to fix this.

It runs faster!

 I refactored some code, cutting run time by 34%.

The program runs once a day, takes 5 minutes, with 4 minutes of that being 2 rounds of "Wait 120 seconds and make sure we really disconnected". Around 6hrs of writing, testing, and getting approval to save 7 seconds of time per day. 

This is the life of a junior.

Definition of Done isn't done

 How not to write the definition of done:

* The new functionality is implemented. 

* Producer & Leader have reviewed it. 

This says nothing useful, and is generic enough to apply to every story. 

"When it works and is reviewed, it is done"

I did what?

 Work is them asking for a program to do a thing. 

It starts off bare bones, and gets more and more complex and complete each day.

And then one day it is done, and you turn it over to be run by an automated system, or other people.

Later, they ask you to make some changes, so you open up the files and try to understand why you wrote that, and this does what?

Eventually you make the changes, and hand it off again, not to think of it till they want more changes. 

Hired full time, no longer a contractor

Spent the morning doing orientation. Spent the afternoon trying to figure out why I couldn't sign into all the internal pages. Eventually learned that there was something going around, and blocking about half the company from getting to internal pages. I head over to the Help Desk page. "Click here for instructions on how to fix it". :::Click::: And blocked... you have to be signed in to see the instructions on how to fix not being allowed to sign in. Figured out it was just clearing the cache. Did that, and then sent the info out to others.