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still a little unsettled Friday, February 11 2022
I'm liking my new work life better now that I'm working with strangers on small achievable projects (as opposed to working with a friend on a sprawling project that always seemed doomed and that, in the end, was). Things are still a little unsettled, though, as became clear yesterday when the CTO of my Boston-based employer sent me five files of C# code for Microsoft's .NET Core framework. There was no explanation or context; I was just asked to see if I could compile this code. I couldn't, it turned out; it contained references to proprietary libraries I had no access to. I'm not yet particularly skilled with Visual Studio, .NET Core, or C#, but at least I'm at the point where I can quickly determine what I determined, and so I managed to maintain the illusion of competence.
Today the CTO arranged for a meeting between me and a software developer from another company in our sprawling corporate archipelago. It turned out that the code I'd been sent was his code, and the references to proprietary libraries had been those of his company. The code in question was for some sort of authentication scheme, and the hope was that I could somehow massage this code into working as a login web page delivered by AWS Lambda, a so-called "serverless" server technology. (Serverless technologies actually do take place on real servers, but the annoying details of server maintenance are left to the provider; all the developer does is write and deploy the code that does whatever needs to be done, always in a stateless functional way.) The developer for the other company sounded like he was from India and had an impatient, annoyed quality as he was explaining things. Nevertheless, it was helpful, and after an hour-long meeting I felt like I could successfully start writing functions for AWS Lambda.
But then later in the day, that developer had second thoughts because AWS Lambda is not a good technology if cookies are to be stored. So now he was suggesting I use a different AWS serverless technology that I'd never heard of called Fargate. This would've all been very annoying had I been working for current employer for very long. But I'm new there and eager to prove my worth, so I said sure, I could hack away at this and see what I can come up with.
I then went back to working on my Azure DevOps pipeline task, which needed a little more tinkering and experimentation for me to realize the build hadn't been happening for many runs and that I'd been copying the same artifacts over and over again from an earlier build, which was why the build wasn't using a profile I was specifying. Once I got that fixed, I'd basically completed my one Jira ticket for the Sprint and could feel like I was actually getting stuff done. It was a good feeling, one I hadn't really had much of for the past couple years.
I celebrated by drinking too much all by myself in front of my computer. I'd taken 150 milligrams of pseudoephedrine this morning in order to power through my Azure DevOps work and put me in an ideal mental state to deal with whatever the CTO had planned for me, and pseudoephedrine almost always causes me to drink to excess. Meanwhile Gretchen was off with the ladies eating at La Florentina and going to the theatre at the mall to watch Marry Me, the latest Jennifer Lopez vehicle.
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