My last day at Corrections was last Friday. My last call involved helping a tech in the field with a mainframe printing problem. Another tech, Dave, sent a print job on the mainframe. After he submitted it she logged in as her and sent the exact job and it printed. I checked the queue on the mainframe and his job was still sitting there in queue to process. The mystery was why is his still in queue if it was submitted before hers?
It turned out that he had submitted another job that was hammering the database, and his other jobs would not print until his first submitted job, that was hammering the database, finished. I also could not cancel it because we had no way of knowing what it was doing to the database and didn't want to force quite something that would cause the database to become corrupt.
Of course my last call would have to be something out from left-field.
My job at DMS is going great. We are converting COBOL code to IP/SQL that calculates billing for calls. State agencies use a system called Suncom for their voice and their data. The process for billing calls is kind complicated, but is currently handled by Cobol. A previous employee had rewritten it to Perl, but it needs to be in IP/SQL to be consistent with everything else. Rick had converted the Perl to IP/SQL, but with lots of bugs. My job was to work through the bugs. I squashed the last one this morning, and spent the rest of the day taking all the data we compile and throwing it into the database. The database it is going in to will be handled by other code that is currently running in Cobol and will be translated in to IP/SQL as soon as I get this part finished.
I am really digging my job. I am picking most of this stuff up pretty quickly, and I'm really enjoying it. I have even been able to clean up some stuff that wasn't done the way that is "best practice." So it is nice to be a newb, but still have something constructive to add from time-to-time, even if it's only small things right now.
I hate meetings, and we seem to have at least two a day. It sucks to be completely mentally entrenched in to fixing some problem, then to have you yanked from it for an hour, and then trying to figure out where the hell you where before and get back in that groove. It disrupts everything. Once I get my barring, though, I will probably be the one in the meetings talking everyone's ear off, instead of sitting there trying to figure everything out, because that is how I can be when I get in my mind that something needs to be done this way or that way.
Other bonuses to this job is that I don't have to wear button-ups all the time. Polos are sufficient. I can also grow my hair out longer. Oooh, oooh, and I get to put Ubuntu on my machine once I am out of rookie stage.
I am pretty overwhelmed. I am very much a novice programmer right now, and on top of that there is a lot to learn outside of the programming about the organization and how the different systems work, as well as who is who and what is what. I just have to take it in a little at a time.
Overall everything rocks. The real benefit will come this Friday when the check deposits in to my bank account. Woot!
It turned out that he had submitted another job that was hammering the database, and his other jobs would not print until his first submitted job, that was hammering the database, finished. I also could not cancel it because we had no way of knowing what it was doing to the database and didn't want to force quite something that would cause the database to become corrupt.
Of course my last call would have to be something out from left-field.
My job at DMS is going great. We are converting COBOL code to IP/SQL that calculates billing for calls. State agencies use a system called Suncom for their voice and their data. The process for billing calls is kind complicated, but is currently handled by Cobol. A previous employee had rewritten it to Perl, but it needs to be in IP/SQL to be consistent with everything else. Rick had converted the Perl to IP/SQL, but with lots of bugs. My job was to work through the bugs. I squashed the last one this morning, and spent the rest of the day taking all the data we compile and throwing it into the database. The database it is going in to will be handled by other code that is currently running in Cobol and will be translated in to IP/SQL as soon as I get this part finished.
I am really digging my job. I am picking most of this stuff up pretty quickly, and I'm really enjoying it. I have even been able to clean up some stuff that wasn't done the way that is "best practice." So it is nice to be a newb, but still have something constructive to add from time-to-time, even if it's only small things right now.
I hate meetings, and we seem to have at least two a day. It sucks to be completely mentally entrenched in to fixing some problem, then to have you yanked from it for an hour, and then trying to figure out where the hell you where before and get back in that groove. It disrupts everything. Once I get my barring, though, I will probably be the one in the meetings talking everyone's ear off, instead of sitting there trying to figure everything out, because that is how I can be when I get in my mind that something needs to be done this way or that way.
Other bonuses to this job is that I don't have to wear button-ups all the time. Polos are sufficient. I can also grow my hair out longer. Oooh, oooh, and I get to put Ubuntu on my machine once I am out of rookie stage.
I am pretty overwhelmed. I am very much a novice programmer right now, and on top of that there is a lot to learn outside of the programming about the organization and how the different systems work, as well as who is who and what is what. I just have to take it in a little at a time.
Overall everything rocks. The real benefit will come this Friday when the check deposits in to my bank account. Woot!
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