A Week of Work

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  Böttingen, Germany
Saturday, June 7, 2008

It's Saturday and my first week of work is done. The intimidation, miscommunication, and nervousness factors have all gone down - since I speak only in German at my job (and with my host family, and just about everywhere else), my comprehension is improving and I'm slowly getting better and understanding people when they talk to each other. It's really hard, though, especially with the dialect. (First I go to Saxony, then I go to Austria, and now to the Schwabishe Alb. Everytime I tell someone here my first time in Germany was Saxony, they laugh. When I ask why, they say it's the dialect. I don't think it's any different, that is, better or worse, than the Austrian, Bavarian, or Schwabish dialects, but whatever.) When people talk directly with me, slow down a bit, and cut back on the dialect, I can get along pretty well.

Programming in a German environment is interesting, though. I'm really happy that my job here is relevant to my career path. I mean, this is literally a dream come true - I'm a programmer in Germany! All my instructions are conversations about my project are in German, but of course, all programming is only done in English. Documentation is done in either language, so I do it in English, but I have to read all the related German documents. And the keyboards! They're getting to me, because all the special characters are moved around, and although when I'm writing something like this you barely notice, in programming you use special characters all the time. (Incidentally, I finally got my computer to connect to the internet.)

My project is to make a program that will automatically generate source code files that in turn will do unit testing for ActiveX components that the programmers in our department write.

Front Door

When it comes to writing the basic outlay of the program, I'm fine, but then when it comes to how I am going to automatically and dynamically generate code based off of whatever file the user will input, I'm clueless. Next week hopefully I'll get a better clue how to go about it. In the meantime, I've written some basic code samples to prepare for it and then done a lot of pre-documentation. Within the documentation and preparation phase, though, I basically need to have a pretty good design of how I'm going to write the program... which means I have to figure out the core of what I'm doing. I'm happy to have a good, relevant challenge, though.

As I said before, I take the bus to work and that's been fine. The second day, though, the second bus I catch to get to work must have been out of commission or something, because instead of a bus and the regular driver, a woman in what was basically an SUV rushed to the stop at the last second. I asked if she was going to Rietheim and she said she was, so I got in and sure enough, she did, but that was weird.

The host family continues to be good. I'm getting along with them well and I'm really happy that they've been helpful with my vegetarianism. It makes it all so much easier. Let me tell you, I've had some good food: spätzle, awesome potatoes, the best fake wurst I've ever had, a variety of good breads, nutella, and of course, schoko müsli. Yes, I'm back in Germany for sure.

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