Revisit on Professional and Ethical Behavior (Week 3)

I wanted to revisit my initial thoughts on my post about professional and ethical behavior and even expand on it. Back then, my biggest concerns was getting the hang of the office culture at my company and fit in. I thought that if I were to fit in, less problems would arise. For example, if I were to dress up like my coworkers and go to work the same time as them, transitioning into that life would be easy. However, after weeks of going to work, I feel like that is the wrong attitude of going to work because it causes me to fully immerse into the culture of the 9-5.

I feel that having an internship should not be an opportunity to just feel what it is like in industry, it is an opportunity to see how the industry fits you and how you yourself with grow and learn from it. I’ve concerned myself with fitting into the lifestyle of my coworkers and forgetting what it’s like to be me. Now, I go to work dressing however I want, eating food wherever I want instead of the cafeteria, and even exercising at work. I felt that this has increased my work output over the weeks, making me feel more responsible and productive.

This change could also be about fully adapting to the workplace and getting to know your peers, but the same principles of respecting yourself and coworkers still apply in this situation.

Description

This week, I worked more on the CRUD REST services I’ve been working on for the past two weeks. The technologies I’ve been working with is Java with the Katharsis framework (http://katharsis.io/docs documentation of how katharsis works. I’m still not too familiar with how it works). This week, I made a couple breakthroughs making the task much simpler. The service I’m building is based off a Calendar-based system already in place on the product I’m working with. I had to dig into the design and implementation of the current service and apply it in my REST service. This required analyzing the object-oriented design of the current service and seeing the best object-oriented design for my REST service. This task required a lot of collaboration with my team, because ultimately, the customers and colleagues will be interacting with this service a lot in the future, and it needs to be maintainable and extensible.

Analysis

Last week, I felt that my productivity wasn’t at its highest because I was getting stuck on the task at hand. I was pretty much thrown into the task of building a REST api service on a company service that I was unfamiliar with. I didn’t know where some of the objects I needed to base my service were located and what dependencies they had. For one of the objects I was modeling, I didn’t realize it was an abstract class. In one of my mapper classes for serialization and deserialization purposes, it requires the instantiation of the object that I am modeling. Abstract classes can’t be instantiated so I had to find a way around it. After talking with my coworkers, I found out that the abstract class was not the object I was supposed to be modeling, but its subclasses. After finding that out, the design and implementation became much easier.