Personal Blog 2

A week before I was going to move to Manchester for the training, I’d started shopping for general household items. Even though I was told that I’d be provided with all these items, I thought it’d be good to bring my own spare items just in case. So I’d finished all the shopping by Sunday, the day before I was going to move to Manchester. I can honestly say that I wasn’t nervous in the slightest; I was extremely excited to move to a new city after spending my whole life in one place.

On the Monday, I set out pretty early so that I could make it to my apartment in good time, making sure there was plenty of time for any breaks I’d need. When I finally arrived outside my apartment building, I was really impressed with the surrounding area. It really looked like a major city, compared to where I was from anyway. I received my key to my apartment and went in to organise all my stuff. Once 12:30pm came, I made my way down to the QA office for the first time since my assessment day. Once I’d arrived, we were given a small presentation about what we’d be doing and then we went straight into learning a bit of Java.

At first, I found the Java to be relatively straight forward, but as it got more complicated, I started to struggle a bit. Even though we’d only be learning Java in a week, I felt like I was falling behind already. However, towards the end of the week, I started to understand the language a lot better. I wasn’t an expert in Java by any means by the end, but I definitely learnt a lot. Even though it was a pretty intense week of learning Java, I definitely enjoyed it.

Week two came about and it was time to learn about Continuous integration and DevOps. Again, I was struggling with the topic a bit. However, this time I noticed that it wasn’t a small minority as it was with Java. It seemed that most other people in my group were relatively new to the topic and were so we were all in the same boat. In the course, I learnt how to use a command terminal more efficiently, learnt how to setup a virtual machine which I used to learn how to use CentOS and Ubuntu, and how to manually install programs. Again, I enjoyed the week a lot and loved to learn about the topic.

For week three, we weren’t going to be at the QA office because a new group had just joined and there wasn’t enough space for everyone. Since my group was now moving on to Enterprise Architecture, we didn’t need to use computers as much as everyone else, so we were moved to The Lowry Theatre. I wasn’t going to complain because this took 10 minutes off my commute, however it was right next to The Lowry Outlet so the temptation to not make lunch and just go to the food court everyday was very high. I gave in to the temptation and stopped making lunch for myself. In my next blog, I will write about Enterprise Architecture and the two weeks that followed.