I realize that day 1 at a new job in a new industry is probably not the most accurate way to gauge the direction of your future, but man, do I have some observations. Before I get into the technical content that shall be the focus of this blog, I want to point out how huge of a change this new world seems to be.

I cannot separate my decision to get into consulting from my decision to get into tech, because they were the same decision. Tech consulting was always what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be client facing, I wanted to participate in more of the business aspects besides straight coding, I wanted to learn new technologies and have constantly changing requirements, I wanted to build something meaningful to help businesses meet actual needs.

That being said, I don’t know where 8th Light will fit in with all of that. It is only my first day.

Culturally, this company is probably as close to Dev Bootcamp as I will get from a real-world company. It is completely illogical how everyone here is so cool. Like, everyone. There seems to be a ton of support. There are snacks! I worked the entire day on a couch.

I would say that the only thing that I am not sure I can quickly adapt to is that there seems to be a lack of structure. People come in late and everyone seems to be gone by 5. There is a fluidity with which people operate here that I am not used to in a business setting. I think that this will likely be the biggest adjustment for me here. That and the daily blogging. So let’s get to it.

Day 1 was a working out the kinks day.

I started on a new machine, so the majority of the morning was spent customizing and downloading. Eventually I started to get into Xcode and a Swift tutorial given to my by my mentor Zach.

Some quick observations about Xcode. Most glaringly, it has a 2 star rating in the App Store, but since I have not gotten very deep into it, I can only report the weaknesses of the platform that I have experienced.

I got about 6 lessons into the tutorial and quickly realized that the version for which the tutorial was written and my current version of Xcode were not compatable. I was getting errors for even a println call. That error in itself is not too awful, however if there are any issues in the file at all, it will not compile so nothing else can be tested. I had to do a lot of commenting out of non-compatable code in order to get just a few lines to run. I have to look more into setting breakpoints and the developer tools offered in the suite.

Another issue I came across was how looped behavior was outputted. Instead of being able to see the output of each iteration, a chunk of code like

for index in 1...5
{
  "This will print 5 times"
}

yielded an output of (5 times) rather than

This will print 5 times
This will print 5 times
This will print 5 times
This will print 5 times
This will print 5 times

As far as Swift itself, the language has a lot of similarities to other languages that I have seen and worked with. I am quickly realizing that all programming languages have the same basic elements. They all have attributes and functions. Collections and “dictionaries” exist in all languages that I have seen.

To be continued…