Week five is done and it’s time for another reflection post! If I am completely honest, I feel lazy about today’s reflection, but I want to keep my streak 😋
The week itself was fine though. The teacher is nice, I was afraid that he wouldn’t be.
Topics
According to our calendar the topic is “structured programming”, which sure sounds useful so we can all get a little more structured, I guess. But still a bit abstract, maybe. But it was already known that this teacher is responsible for our Java block, so unsurprisingly we started learning about Java and installed IntelliJ for that purpose. In the web develpoment course I participated in (all online) a while back I’ve already learned some Java basics and for practice purposes installed IntelliJ Idea back then. This time however wasn’t gonna be the community version, but “the real deal”. Except that we went for the 30 days trial first and then tried to get it registered through GitHub Education, which is new. Well, it was a mess and took some time away from actual learning. In the end we all got rejected because GitHub Education didn’t agree with something. But that is for administration to figure out now. Who knows, maybe tomorrow we’ll know more.
A lot of the things we went through, were repetition for me. Which doesn’t hurt, of course. But I didn’t take many notes in my physical journal. There is commented code documentation though. To me personally it was most interesting to learn more about using IntelliJ: remembering some shortcuts/hotkeys as well as understanding the structure and hierarchies better. Also, all those abbrevations are still a bit hard to remember (SE, SDK, JDK, JRE, JVM…).
Overall it was mostly theory and I was glad, when we got some exercises to practice with. Friday was very theoretical again, but the teacher announced that we will be doing mostly exercises on Monday. I hope that’s true!
The future internship
There is not much more to report about the theory of Java or the exercises that we did during last week. So I’m gonna change the topic to other stuff that happened while at the company.
For one, my seat neighbours and I were trying to figure out about the upcoming internship. It’s happening later next year, but we thought it would be good to be as prepared and informed as possible. This is a bit difficult, because we don’t know which companies are gonna show up to introduce themselves, if there’s gonna be a good match or if it’s better to pick out some company “from the outside” (if they offer internships), how high the chances are to be taken over in each of those companies and: what do we even want to do? Personally for me, from when I applied for the training until now I am thinking I should aim for web development. But we have just started and it’s not impossible that I find interest in the field of software or mobile development. But it also very much depends on the projects that each company does, but it’s hard to figure out by looking at those companies websites, because they are tailored to inform customers, not future interns.
We did what we could though, by researching the affiliated companies, interviewing two people from the higher classes and also our teacher.
Website tweaking
Something else. Whenever I had extra time I was tweaking around on this website a bit and doing some research for it, looking at other people’s websites, looking for webrings etc. If you have noticed a few changes around here, that’s why 😊 A thing that I haven’t figured out but still wanna do is tags. I have blog categories at the moment and thought that is enough, but I keep running into a problem where I can’t have more than one category. The issue is that my categories are delivered as String. Now I am not a JavaScript genius at all, so I tried using the help of ChatGPT to have my categories saved as an Array, but I can’t figure it out. wether I use a - or a , to separate my categories, it’s seen as one category. It occured to me, that this could also be an Astro thing and that I have to implement Tags specifically, not categories. One day, I’m gonna attempt to do that. For now, I don’t have the time or nerve.
Other stuff on my mind
I’ve been looking into more retro gaming too and along the way I thought of fandoms. Am I still part of any? I think I am, at least Mass Effect, I suppose. But compared to like… twenty years ago, I am not hardcore into stuff anymore. Do my old fandoms even still count? Like Final Fantasy 7 (the old one). Was a huge fan back then and for a long time. But it is also a long time ago and it’s not like I’ve been “actively” being a FF7-fan. Didn’t do fan art, didn’t read fanfic, didn’t even replay. It’s just a good memory. Does that still count as “fandom”?
Regarding newer games and series etc., there is obviously stuff that I like. But am I really a fan? Or fan enough? It doesn’t feel the same anymore.
