The things that noone tells you

Working with JavaEE and JSF through GlassFish has really put my problem solving to the test. My education did not provide me with the information I needed for this task, nor does the documentations or the tutorial/books on the subjects.

It's been a real test for me but I'm not gonna say I regret any of it because by facing all the weirdest bugs and errors I've learned so incredibly much researching how things work. The the kind or errors I've had are the kind where you get one error in the stack trace, but the real error is somewhere entirely else, and it's been ranging from errors on my part in not knowing how things work to nothing I could have done at all because it's a known error in the application server through the documentation being plain wrong about how it works.

JSF rendered html still looks horrid, but reading how it was rendered really solved how to work with JSF for me. Experimenting with code takes time, but it's a great way to learn. My hands are dirty, my legs are knee-deep in the code-mud but I feel great, because I pulled through this far all on my own.

Now, I can focus on the area I know (reasonably well at least); CSS. Someone brew me some tea because I'm going in!

First contact!

I finally fixed my issues with GlassFish and JavaEE (the ones I've had thus far at least) and made it all the way through the stack from frontend JSF to en entry in my database. FINALLY, I can start building for real.

That is all.

(I'm also pretty down with a cough so this success is probably overhyped)

GlassFish hates me

Since November I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with my glassfish; I've updated it, I've changed the eclipse links jars, I've reinstalled everything and now I can't even get it to start. Every time I think I found someone with the same issue as me, the solution that worked for them doesn't work for me. At first I would just get a plain RuntimeException whenever I tried to make a new JDBC resouce in the console, but today booting up, it won't start at all after I installed the updater in NetBeans.

I don't really know what to do newt, I mean; I uninstalled and reinstalled everything but the JDK and JRE. I just wanna code! What is this? I'm not feeling the sysadmin in me today.

Learning through work

At my internship I'm learning a lot getting headfirst into building things in a language I've never touched before. I got to read one chapter of a book on ruby, one chapter of a book on rails and here I am now; building things completely blind. It's fun and I'm learning a lot but I do wish I at least knew the language syntax or some basics about the framework, it would make googling soo much easier.

Today I got neck deep in frontend JavaScript and I can't help but to feel relief to venture into somewhat familiar grounds again (I know JavaScript backend but not so much the frontend parts). I know frontend. Frontend is good to me. (Sorry ruby, I'm sure 'll like you more when I can understand you).

It's a joy to wake up every morning when you get to have so much fun!

Laerning is love, learning is life

The thing I like the most about learning new things is how it widens my knowledge about what i already know. It also gives me new views to bring back to my coding in my "native" language and the other ones I already know.

Today I had fun learning more about GitHub pages by learning Jekyll. I also realized there's project pages, and user pages, which makes it immensely easier to make not just one but several portfolio sites. I can tie my domain name to host my site on Github. That's a lot of fun and very useful to a poor student like me.

Next on my list: Ruby on Rails!

Finding your own worth

Standing before my internship and the last part of my education I'm starting to have a look at the wages and it's turning my head upside down. One wage statistics site shows one wage range while others show a completely. Not to mention the part where you have to somehow estimate how good you actually are. How does one do that?

How does one measure how skilled one is compared to others with nothing to measure against? Against my classmates? But how are they compared to others? And how do I prove my worth?

I think I've arrived at a number I think is reasonable but based on what? I've settled for the strategy that I'll try to aim for that number but I'll accept whatever I get offered. Having a job is more important than worrying about selling myself short.

8/9 and going forward!

I've been rather busy with school and work while trying to find me an internship that's gonna lead to a job and so far it seems like I've had a huge success.

Out of all the courses I've completed so far 8/9 I've got the highest grade in, and the 9th one is a passing grade. I know school and real life are two different things but it still feels good to do well in school. If I can't even do that then how will I manage working with it professionally?

And I did manage to find a company that wants to hire me if all goes well during my internship! Woohoo! They're very nice to me and treat me as an employee already! My hopes are high though I'm also sad that I'm leaving my current company; I really like the company I've worked for the last 7 months.