Appraisal

Today was my first appraisal as a developer, and it went very well. This has really been the first opportunity where I could get some peer feedback.

At the meeting was myself and Bill and we spent just over an hour, running over from an originally planned 45 minutes.

The first topic covered was what projects I had been a part of, so far these have been:

• STU186 - Student counselling data migration
• STU188 - Scholarships application system
• STU176 - Postgraduate progression management database (aka PPMD)
• RES032 - INFINITE
  

Bill had commented that there was initially a plan for my development, there were three projects lined up which I was to play a part in with a gradual easing through Coldfusion and DBMS. As these initial projects fell through the way my training was going to develop fell to the mercy of the available projects which came in the order written above. As a result the order in which I worked on the different languages and methodologies was out and I was handed larger projects then would normally be assigned, generally I would take this a bit of flattery however when I mentioned to Bill that I took the STU188 build from end to end he was genuinely surprised, which in turn surprised me.

Going forward we have agreed on an outline for my development which will centre around ColdFusion and DBMS in alternating cycles (where workflow requirements allow). Bill's opinion is that by concentrating on these two packages I should be capable of standing on my own feet by February which is encouraging indeed.

We also spoke about taking on the BOXI business objects system, we only really summarised this as CF and DBMS will take priority and it may not be wise to throw in another package to learn while still developing a skillset for these.

BOXI is essentially a MI (Management Information) tool, it allows a user to create MI reports with drag and drop functionality, so if I want a report on XYZ then I can drag them from a menu and drop them on the page and BOXI will do all the work for me. The main thing being that you dont need to know SQL to be able to produce reports, in my opinion I need to know SQL, once I have solidified skills in SQL I will feel ready to move on to BOXI development. We both agreed on this.

As I said this meeting was very productive and encouraging and I look forward to consistently hitting these objectives set for me.