Looking Forward

Tomorrow marks 3 months on the job as a software developer, a somewhat monumental occasion. My company, like most companies, has a 3 month probationary period, and it's always good to make it past this point. It's typical to receive some sort of review at this point, and I'm not sure if I'm going to get one or not. Nonetheless, my benefits kick in and I can start taking advantage of some of the perks of the job, including paid time off. I already have access to 5 personal days, but I will now start accruing vacation days, as well. Also, I was lucky enough to survive the last 3 tumultuous months without healthcare, which was quite the risk and a typical by-product of our broken healthcare system. In other countries, this wouldn't be something you have to worry about, but in my case, if I had gotten the Coronavirus, it would likely have bankrupted us. Even if one of use gets it with health care, it would be inordinately costly, which to me just doesn't make sense. This creates a disincentive for many people to seek help when they are sick, thus spreading the illness, whereas countries with universal healthcare may be able to contain it a little better. Sorry for the tangent, but this is a topic that always bothers me.

I'm in a bit of a weird spot at work in the project we are working on. I've built out pretty much everything I could with the mockups I've been given, so now to stay busy, I'm having to go beyond the mockups. This is always dangerous, and often results in having to rewrite the code to the specifications my team agrees on. I'm trying not to get too heavy into the styling, but I also don't have the data I need to be able to get too functional either. My focus has really been on working on the UI changes in different screens, like the settings screen and a screen representing case management for the representative. The case management screen has a lot of similarities to the leads page, where they will be given a list of all of their cases and they can search this list from a search bar. There will also likely be different filters we can put on this search functionality, but we really haven't gotten far enough into the planning process to even figure that out, yet. I got to mess around with some animations from Lottie to put on the header of this page, but I didn't end up finding one that looked all that great. If you're not familiar with Lottie, AirBnB came out with a platform for animated images that are easily imported into projects and work really well with React and React Native. Many modern websites and applications use Lottie, and it really adds a lot of life to the application. I created a nice system for them to work with both web versions and native versions, so we have something to go on moving forward.

Towards the end of the day today, we met with the backend developer to discuss some of the information we needed to be bringing in to the application. He wrote the application we are replacing using ASP, so this was going to be a touchy subject. I think he knew we have been working on a replacement for his application, but I know I would take it somewhat personally if my application was being replaced. The fact of the matter is, though, that the application he created looks really dated. It looks like an accounting or CRM application built in the mid 90s, and just isn't what our company wants to be represented by. The corporate executives want the representatives to feel like they are working with a very modern company, and the feel our application has will give them that look. So, we spent a good amount of time in the meeting go over his questions of why we were building the replacement, leaving us little time to actually address the questions we had. By the end of the meeting, I would say about a quarter of our questions were actually answered, but at least we got enough to be able to start building it out. We are set to meet back with him again on Thursday to discuss some of the things we were supposed to discuss today, so hopefully we can get a little further with him. Communication is always one of the most difficult parts of working on a team, and this team is no exception.

Until tomorrow!