Question from one of my teammates on my new work team:

“Did you just learn techA & techB in the 3 days since you’ve joined the project?”

Well, enough to make things work for this portion of the project, anyway.  And thank you for noticing!

My teammate and I have been “pair-programming” remotely, by which I mean: we talk over the phone about the approach and occasionally screen-share / present to show what we mean.  Oh, and of course, commit at regular intervals into a shared git branch.  When I joined the team, the story (uh, work unit, I guess, for those of you not well-versed in software) was written such that the work would have 4 subtasks.  I proposed doing it differently, based on some prior experience I had with techC, which is the end-result of our efforts with techA and techB.  The team bought in, and off we went!

Challenges:

• neither my teammate nor I had much experience with techA or techB
• my teammate doesn’t have much experience with techC
• my teammate and the rest of the team are in Minnesota, which means: no whiteboard drawings, an offset of an hour in schedule, we haven’t met each other in person, …
• I’m brand-spanking new to the team, so am still navigating getting all of my accounts, figuring out how not to break other folks’ work, figuring out how to prove things _do_ work, …

It looks like by not too much longer today, I’ll be putting in my first merge request for a significant feature for the new project.  Woot!  Good first (real) week.

For those techies interested in the secret decoder ring for the technologies:

• techA = Ansible
• techB = Salt
• techC = Kubernetes