Sonya Barry's Blog

April 2006 Archives

Confessions of a noob...

I'm a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Computer Science program at Mills College, and an intern at Sun. I report to the Community Manager at java.net, and this blog is one of my assignments.

When she hired me Marla said she was looking for somebody who wanted development experience and somebody who could write. The goal is for me to join a project on java.net, contribute something meaningful over time (there's my dev experience) and blog about the experience here.

So here's the deal - I have no professional programming experience, but I do have plenty of experience working on and with engineering teams both in QA and as a technical writer. I've had about a year and a half worth of Java programming classes, including a Data Structures and Algorithms class.

I don't think I'm an idiot (most days), and I got through those classes with an appropriate amount of agony and final success, but I've been around the block enough times to know that classroom training doesn't equal the real world experience. I'm excited about contributing something real here, but just a little bit terrified of screwing it up royally.

I decided try my luck with Mifos for my first time out. I've always been a fan of microfinance, and this is a great way to get involved and get some experience. They're also experiencing some growing pains, just like me, because they're in the process of moving to java.net and going open source at the same time.

My first task is helping them move their bugs over to java.net. I'm happy with this, since I've put in plenty of time in the land of QA, it's a familiar place to start. We'll see how it goes...

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