wagamama!

My leaving do for CSC was last night, I had a good time =D

Went to wagamama’s and had Ramen with seafood and a prawn starter I don’t remember the name of. Very nice and healthy food indeed, i used chopsticks too, which is an achievement for me! The wooden ladle I got with the soupy noodle based dish was an interesting contraption haha!

We then went for some drinks in the slug and lettuce across the road, I had strawberry beer mmmmm. I had so many tastes I don’t usually partake in, all in one evening. It was nice to see people at work, outside of work. the general conversation topic stayed with geekyness though lol, I will miss the development team at CSC!

A good night, thanks to everyone that attended!

CSC – My experience this year

The purpose of this post is to let people know how I’m getting on at CSC and what i have been up to 5 days a week, paying particular attention to what it is like in the industry to prepare people at University in my year.

I have been working for CSC now for 4 months on an industrial placement. In these 4 months I have learnt and experienced an immeasurable amount of skills working in the IT industry. I have got to say i definitely don’t regret taking a year out from my degree (although there was times where I thought I wish I was in DEC10 pulling all nighters with the crew), I definitely recommend it.

I have increased my technical skills over the last 4 months but I think what i have learnt most of all is how a software development environment works, how people think in the industry, how people develop and interact with peers/ managers, how we interact with users. All this stuff from a students perspective is perceived as wishy washy irrelevant stuff, but it is essential (Owen knows! Owen is right!)

Linking the software development to business cases is pivotal too, as it is a business after all and we need to try and quantify the savings a company gets from better software, so we get paid for coding it! Although sometimes this can be a challenge, especially within the NHS!

Another important point to note is being a ‘Software Engineer’ (yes that’s my job title, sexy i know d:)  from my experience working on a small development team is more than coding, a lot more.  Testing, deploying code, designing interfaces and models, documentation both in and out of code, configuration on servers and local machines, management of databases and resources and user involvement are all just as important.

Technically speaking I have had experience in a good number of different technologies, some at greater depth than others. A few i have listed below:

• Programming in C# and the .NET environment.
• ASP.NET, XHTML, CSS, AJAX with JS
• XML
• SQL SERVER  and T-SQL scripting
•  using O(i)SQL/MSDOS scripts for deployment
• Crsytal Reports
• VBA (this is not as easy as it sounds)

So… what do i actually code i hear you asking? Well I’m going to deliberately leave that out of this public blog post because of confidentiality and such (:

Overall I have had a good 4 months!

I am off for 10 days for family time + food @ xmas then partying with friends + drink @ new years before i return to the routine of 9 till 5 until August.  This is the one thing that’s a drag sometimes, the same routine every day, I like variety and impulsiveness as some days I’m in the zone and lovin’ coding and getting loads of work done then some-days I’m tired.

But Overall I am liking my year out and would like to thank all that have supported and helped me be where I am now.

Any questions, feel free to ask.