Assesment Piece: Learning agreement draft submission

My Learning Agreement has been more or less finished since the end of July, I've sat with Mairi and Peter and read through it to get a bit of guidance from them as well a comparing notes with Sanccia who is now on her final report.

I have now been appointed a tutor for the duration of my placement and a draft copy of the LA has now been reviewed, amended where apporpriate and submitted.

One of the problems I've had with the LA is getting up to the wordcount quoted in the university guidelines. The only way I can explain this is at this point in time I cant further explain the methods by which my learning objectives can be achieved and as a result I am way off the targeted wordcount.

Another possible issue I might face here is learning outcome 4, design of solutions, during my time with peter pratt earlier he mentioned that I may not get to design any software packages, sanccia was only getting to do one now right at the end of her time and I would be at the mercy of the workflow at the time.

However, I am confident that there is good quality content in the agreement and to pad out the numbers would be to add unnecessary content.

Ill wait and see.

Back to work

Just returned from my stint in hospital, broken bones and skin grafts et al. No internet access in my new house and with only a teasing hint of an appointment from my new ISP, I'm delighted to be back at work.

This week has gotten off to a slow start, I have started working through tutorials and experimenting with two new technologies, they are MachII and ColdSpring, both of which are extensions to the ColdFusion development tools. So far I have been concentrating on MachII which is a Model View Controller framework for ColdFusion markup (images have been added to the evidence folder), I have read over the documentation for ColdSpring however I feel with all the reading in the world, without practical application I am not holding the information nor developing skills as much as I would like.

I spoke to Bill this morning regarding work and he has assured me that there is work there, however I also know how busy he and the team are. So with that I understand that its not easy for them to set development work aside for someone of my level to work on and be mentored on.

To date I have completed all training modules, installed and ran all the necessary software and tools I need and I am also up to date with all University assesment pieces that accompany the Work based learning module. I am now trying to learn more about about the technology and processes we use and filling my day with additional tutorials and study.

As we are only mid way through the second month I was not expecting to be carrying an in depth technical workload but I am finding it frustrating that I dont have any practical work where I can apply and develop what I'm learning, I'm also finding it more and more difficult to fill my time with relevant and usefull tasks.

Today is my last day before my stint in hospital, an utter disappointment but necessary.

However I had this in mind while studying the ColdFusion material and have written out enough of the study documents to keep myself busy over the next fortnight and keep the material fresh for my return, hopefully with some practice over while I'm away I can start be productive and make a contribution to the team when I return.

I have prepared notes on all the areas I have studied since I arrived at my placement and will be taking these with me, this includes:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• ColdFusion

By the end of today I will have covered all units in the CF material and given myself enough of the basic techniques needed to develop for the web in this placement. I genuinely cannot wait to get back to work.

Meetings

Today was my first team meeting, these are held every month and ran by the department manager.

The subject of the meeting was regarding the parameters of job positions in and around development projects, who's responsibility was each task. This seems to part of an ongoing analysis of the partioes involved in the different aspects of the process, ie from design or build, analyst or developer.

From what I have understood, the results of this will be fed back to the senior staff through our manager and this may have an impact on the way future projects are run.

I will try to get a copy of the document used in the meeting and include this in my reports.

Technically, this week is still very much focused on ColdFusion and currently at two thirds completion. I feel this should probably be a bit quicker however I am writing up my own notes as I go along. I will do a small report on this once I have completed the course.

Hello ColdFusion

Today I have been working on the ColdFusion training material. The training actually started yesterday however today was a better day to update the blog as yesterday was generally taken up by some teething problems.

The problems I had were due to the initial setup and as follows:

• Although it installed ok there was a database function omitted from the setup which required a re install to fix (RDS functionality)
• CF required a plug in for the Eclipse IDE, the downloads from CFEclipse were temporarily unavailable but was resolved.
• Adobe training material was written for Dreamweaver not CFEclipse
• As a result of the above alot of time was spent learning about CFEclipse and figuring out the parallels between that and Dreamweaver.

These problems were resolved or workarounds were developed by this morning. You may ask why I used CFEclipse and not dreamweaver as recommended? The reason being that I had been learning Eclipse with OO software development, its an industry standard IDE and it used by the developers here in Development services.

Now at close of business I have covered a third of the ColdFusion training and enjoyed all of it so far, the CF package does seem to make web development less time consuming as it can dynamically write HTML and JavaScript, similar to the Agile development module in the first year of my degree, only without the Model View Controller architecture.

Tomorrow I will continue with the rest of the CF training and I expect this will probably take up the remainder of the week for me .

Still establishing an online presence....

Friday and the end of my second full week, as mentioned in yesterdays blog my current project is getting up to speed with web based engineering. I have now completed the W3 HTML tutorials and written an accompanying tutorial for cut/paste code snippets without having to trawl the internet. Yestarday I also started on the CSS tutorials (which is a bit bigger than I expected) and looking to make a dent in the Javascript tutorials by close of business.

Something worth mentioning here is that although I am still in my incubatory phase here I have noticed a big difference in how I am learning, I think I am being exposed to a wider range of techniques in software development and over the last few days I think I have covered more of the database procedures than I did on the databases module at Napier. I understand its pretty big of me to say that while not having applied the skills professionally however the difference seems to lie in that we were taught within the confines of the coursework we were working towards, although we touched on a broader spectrum of topics in lectures some of the methodologies and techniques we discussed were easily placed at the back of a folder since they weren't part of the working set or simply forgotten since there was no practicle application of the fringe subjects.

Given the time and resource constraints at Napier (in terms of lecturer time/workload/resources etc) I would imagine that there is not alot of opportunities for deviation in the run up to a coursework.

Here over the last fortnight I have seen deeper into the capabilities if the technology we use and still only really scratching the surface, whats next......?

Establishing an Online presence

Good Morning! Today I am working on HTML, through a series of training sessions using the W3 schools and WebMonkey websites, the focus will be on (X)HTML, CSS & Javascript. Up to this point my experience with Web Technologies has been restricted to the coursework given in the university environment, the coursework itself was very good and I learned alot from the two web applications I developed. In my opinion what I am doing now is revisiting alot of that work however it's now in a professional environment and it will pay dividends to learn how these applications are developed in real world situations, I also expect to learn more about these technologies, how they work and how I can create and manipulate them for myself.

I strongly believe that I need to be in a position of autonomy with regards to my technical abilities to be an effective software engineer which is the whole point of my 4 years at university.

Coldfusion was on the agenda for today, I understand that Bill had discussed this with Peter and Mairi and was worried that given the depth of the training material he would rather there was support available rather than leave me to it, a point I understand completely and I find it reflects the departments positive attitude to development.