4 min read
It was another productive day at the office as I got another large changelist submitted. This was the very first one I ever made over a month ago and it was finally approved after many tweaks, so I was pretty excited. This was my first CL to be reviewed and approved by people from another team. Now that I've got several CLs checked in, I'm feeling a little less stressed. Still there's much work to be done.
I actually made an effort to take a bit of a break today and went to the team meeting, the team lunch, and a team coffee break. I should probably do this more often because sometimes I get so immersed in my work I don't get up from my desk unless I'm extremely hungry or really need to use the restroom. Not to mention if I take breaks I have to figure out where I left off with my train of thought and code.
I also had a meeting with my mentor at the end of the day to discuss how things have been going. I mentioned that I wasn't sure about converting to full-time since I've only been programming for 2.5 years. It seems the other people who are converting have had multiple internships here or somewhere like Microsoft, Amazon, etc and/or have been programming since high school or even earlier. I know it's not a competition since there are plenty of jobs for all of us but I still feel grossly unprepared in comparison.
Nevertheless I was told that if I want a job here then go for it. It's going to be the most stressful 2 interviews of my life so far (since they're going to be more rigorous than regular internship interviews) but I guess I'll have to tough it out. Not many people get the opportunity to be given a job offer before even graduating, let alone during the first few weeks of their senior year. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to have the time to prepare enough given how much work is still left to do for the project, so I'm not very optimistic this will end well.
For now, I'm going to focus on doing well on my project while maintaining my sanity. To do so, I left my workstation 2 hours earlier than usual today, but then again I came in an hour earlier because I was craving croissants for breakfast. After hanging around for a bit in one of the massage chairs, I went back to my apartment. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, what was I greeted by other than the biggest cockroach I've ever seen (roughly 3 inches). However, this is only the second cockroach I've ever seen, the first just harmlessly scurrying across the sidewalk at night.
Don't tell me cockroaches can't fly because this thing was scurrying around the walls of the small stairwell and flying from wall to wall every few seconds, making it impossible to get close to the door of the suite without it flying into me or accidentally letting it in. Just look up "flying cockroach" if you don't believe me.
Normal person's reaction to seeing a flying roach for the first time
So what did I do? I tried to coax the demon spawn over to me so I could lead it away from the third floor. Believe it or not, it actually worked. Although every time it got closer to me it was terrifying. And no, I didn't scream like a little girl but I did nearly fall down the stairs. I got it to fly around the second floor instead and made my escape back up to the third floor and into my apartment suite before it could chase me.
Between surviving that terrifying encounter and getting more code checked into the codebase, I'd say today was a success.