I spent some time thinking about it in the car this morning. If I count the time I spent working through the co-op system, I can say that I’ve been working in the tech industry for about eight years. Kind of crazy. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with companies that have a great workflow. I have a sense of how a great software development workflow should probably go. So, as I’m going along if I see something that’s so obviously off-the-rails shouldn’t I speak up? I mean, I’m not saying that I’m perfect in my procedures, but when things are getting into train wreck territory something has to be done.

Today I took advantage of one a sort-of-benefit of my job. Last night I took my work laptop home with full intentions of working from home today. I totally recognize this is a luxury. My colleagues have been taking advantage of it for a while now. I’ve been meaning to give it a go for a long time. The only thing that was really holding me back was just bringing the darn thing home. So finally I had resolved to just do it. It was going to be awesome. I’d just open it, connect to the private network and start coding away. Well, it didn’t quite turn out so perfectly. I had some issues with connections, and some applications that I could have sworn I had installed were missing. It got so bad that I was actually considering heading into office just to get the laptop set up. I put on some work clothes and was set to go, but in the end I managed to make some appropriate connections. I was able to get on the network. Unfortunately for me, the people I needed to talk to once I was connected were already gone for the weekend. And so, that’s my sort-of-wasted day. First day in terms of setup is always the worst. It all becomes easier from this point forward. To be honest I don’t think I’m going to use this option all that much but it’s certainly good to know it’s available.

I know it’s a bit silly, but I had a bit of a eureka moment at work. For a long while I feel like I’ve been trying to find my place on the team. In putting together this team, my manager decided to put together a diverse group. It seems like everyone else is up on their technologies and strange acronyms. I just hear them and keep my head down focusing on my own thing. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I do my work. I’m good at what i do. Still, for a while I was wondering if I’d ever get into the swing of things in terms of becoming knowledgeable in general about what’s going on. I finally came to the realization that I don’t need to be master of everything. A colleague was expressing frustration with a Perl/CGI page he was working on, and how a snippet of jQuery wasn’t working for him. I offered to jump into action. In those moments I was the expert. I felt animated and invigorated. It was a good feeling. So, no, I don’t need to know every single thing. I just need to make sure that I’m really good at my areas of expertise. If I wasn’t a good fit for the team I wouldn’t have been hired in the first place. So there.