I’ve started the ramp-up to my new job over the past few days. Mostly I’ve just been setting up my workstation….a Dell Dimension with a Pentium 4 2GHz processor, .5 GB RAM, running RedHat 7.3. I’m not too chucked about RH 7.3…my preference would have been Mandrake 9, since it seems to be better suited to newer systems from the get-go. I spent this morning trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get the Soundblaster Live soundcard working properly. A brief rundown of the steps:
That, my friends, is called progress.
I also talked with my new boss for a bit about implementing some aspects of Extreme Programming to speed my transition without stalling development. While Extreme Programming covers a whole development methodology, we will focus on pair programming at the beginning. Basically, I’ll sit next to the senior development, both of us working on the same machine, and we’ll code together. It’s an interesting concept, and people tend to love it or hate it. I used it a bit at my first programming job for the similiar purpose of getting me up to speed on the technologies, and it worked quite well. Obviously, it is dependent on the dynamic between the two developers, but I think as long as we don’t hate each other (which isn’t the case yet, after a few days) it should work well.
Posted on 21 April 2003