To be honest, last Wednesday (whole day) and Thursday morning was, I think, the most unproductive hours of my internship here at Stratpoint. I was supposed to be helping Dru with the integration of our project into the Spring MVC, but I seem to get lost/go crazy everytime I take a shot at it. It was really the wrong time to have done that (or rather, done nothing) because Sir Roqs (project consultant) just told us last Monday to “avoid having idle times” and to always ask ourselves “How can I be of help to our project? What aspect can I attend to after finishing my assigned task?”. It was a good thing I asked co-intern David if we would have a meeting anytime soon (I can’t remember when I asked him this, whether it was before or after we had our lunch). He responded by telling me that we WILL meet at 2:30 the same day (Thursday). Cool!
We ended up having the meeting a bit earlier (at 2:00 pm instead). This was the time we were able to discuss the changes that were made regarding the features of the project. We were basically voting on how certain aspects of the frontend would appear. After that, we distributed the work (the designing of the different pages) amongst ourselves. Taking Sir Roqs’ suggestion last Monday during our Starbucks meeting, I will first help out Arvin, David and Denise with their work, while Dru (alone?) will work on the API-Spring mashup. Our meeting ended at around 3:15 pm (haha, sorry for the 15-minute overtime kickz!) and we immediately proceeded with what needed to be done. Since I am the only one new to ZK (a framework for creating UI for web apps), I had to read on the basics first. Unfortunately, time passed too quickly and before I knew it, it was time to go home (I have not even started coding in ZK yet).
I continued with the Thursday task on the whole of Friday. Feeling a little bored with reading ZK articles from the web during the morning, I decided to switch to direct ZK coding. Although it is never a good idea to immediately program with a new language, it kind of worked for me because tag-based .zul files are quite readable/understandable after a few hits and misses. After a few minutes though, my momentum was slightly put of because Sir Aries summoned us interns for a progress-report meeting. It was basically the same kind of meeting we had with him the last time, except that there was (more?) progress now. Of course we told him about Sir Roqs’ new ideas, and he took note of them. Sir Aries gave us an (unneeded?) apology for not being able to give more time to the OJT Project for he and Sir Roqs have their own work to attend to (The apology again reminding me of how different the lives of other interns in the other companies are. Haha, bitter??). Finally he asked us (again, I think) when we would be able to finish the project. (don’t ask about or response, I swear we were just looking at each other for an answer)
P.S.
Last Wednesday might not have been that unproductive at all! After a week of desperately finding the spare time, I was (finally) able to watch Iron Man! (Thanks to the production team of the Iron Man movie for promoting Dell!… and Audi too, I guess) Next up, Speed Racer!
- Raymond
