Here, have a photo of questionable quality taken from where I sit. You can probably see me in the reflection.
So, yet again, it’s time for me to answer the most important of questions — what did I do today? Well, in my opinion today was a lot more straightforwards compared to yesterday. I started off by continuing to review the code that I was assigned to look at yesterday while waiting for the most important part of the day — the stand up meeting. Actually, I’m kidding about that. Stand up meetings are an essential part of the scrum/really any project management system that are, if anything, supposed to be as unobtrusive as possible. Or so people say; from my experience in robotics and from what I’ve seen at Pendo that’s not really the case. Nevertheless, they’re a pretty great way for people (specifically me) to see what people are up to and what they’ll be working on throughout the day. It also seems like it’s a great time for the people on each team (I think I mentioned I’m with the Ion Chefs, a fellow group of geeks backend engineers).
I swear this isn’t a filler image
But again, that wasn’t really the most interesting part of the day for me. Today just happened to be the day of a Town Hall at Pendo, which is an event that’s pretty similar to the ones that we have at CA. Basically a few representatives of the company got up and talked about the company for a while in a very transparent (that’s one of Pendo’s core values~!) way. There was this one segment where people were basically able to submit any question to the CEO (Todd) and have it answered, which led to some candid answers that surprised me. Overall, I think the Town Hall was a pretty neat experience that I got to be a part of, as it let me learn more about how the company operates.
[TECHNICAL STUFF WARNING AGAIN]
So for the rest of the day I continued to work on one of Pendo’s Slack bots, affectionately called Pankbot, which is designed to let people give commendations to people. For the most part I spent my time tracking down and trying to fix various bugs in the existing software, including this one input sanitization problem. Personally I think that working with this codebase has been quite enjoyable in that some of the code has been pretty difficult for me to understand. The scope and size of the codebase is probably the root cause of that, as for the most part I only work with things that are usually less than 1.5k lines. To be fair, this one is around that size, but I don’t have that much experience in the language it’s written in, Go (one trick Python user here…). Either way, I think I really like Go as a language, and I might have onset symptoms of an unhealthy obsession with the Gopher (which I still don’t know the official name of). Welp, that’s it for now. Until next time — have a Gopher as my obsession with Go grows.
~John