I never knew that waking up at 8 o'clock and leave 30 minutes later and come back to 5:30ish would be so tiring since then I have to eat a quick dinner, shower, and do a whole bunch of chores then sleep. Not the best schedule, but now I learned that you may wanna manage your time not in blocks per day. Instead of doing it like this, you have days of rest (despite not even happening during the internship) where you can have a full(ish) day of freetime.
While I'm working for roughly 9 hours, you get quite a bit of time learning the ropes. I got a nice refresher on how GitHub works -- it supports not just a group, but it can come in handy for yourself to understand what updates you made and which created some serious errors.
It's worth mentioning the work itself: It's very independant. This internship currently just feels like an English research paper as you have to go look up your topic and engage into doing your work. Kevin, himself, doesn't have a large knowledge about this information... so tests and research is key.
What I've learned within these 3 days (besides the mechanics of work) is how sensors and servos work and programming in an "invisible" environment where you have to guess and check your errors. Some things I didn't know is that you can (rather than plugging in directly) plug in different sensors in the same slot and they'll recieve all the actions. I also understand how it feels to be limited in your own code because of how much your machine can compute and handle.
Hopefully next time I can actually stay awake to write my next blog post! In fact, this first report is written during the time I should be working because of how everything laid out. Next time, you'll get a shorter post on what I've learned. Can't guarantee you that, tho ^^'.
EDIT: I should really talk about the actually sensors next time. It'd be nice to be talking about me sitting on a chair for 20 minutes figuring out the problem.
Actually, George, writing this post *is* working! I find it easiest and best to use my blog as a technical journal to record what I'm doing *while* I do it. If you wait until later, experience teaches me that you will either do a poor job or none at all, since it is both more difficult and less rewarding (even painful) to have to write something up later from memory.
ReplyDeleteAs an example, here is what I did on Friday and Saturday morning using Kevin's post and my pyboard:
http://proyectojuanchacon.blogspot.com/2015/07/updating-firmware-on-my-pyboard.html
And yes, the schedule of working in the real world can be tiring. And *yes*, it can be very independent! That's the main lesson I hope you can get from an internship like this. My brother has been a professional programmer for 30 years. The first 15 of those years he worked as an IBM 370 assembly language programmer for a company in New York. When they hired him straight out of college, the first thing they did was tell him: "Here is the computer system you'll be working on. Your first task is to write a game for it. You have a month to do that." Then he was left to his own devices (and a full set of IBM 370 manuals on the shelf above his desk) to solve that problem.
When someone is going to pay you for your work, they want to get value from you. If you have to ask what to do all the time, you are not helping them much. To be useful to a future employer you need to take initiative and be self reliant. Your employer tells you what she/he wants, and *you* have to figure out how to deliver it. If you can do that, you've got value.