After being back from vacation has been neat. At least what came to the office atmosphere. The first week I worked almost completely from home, week after that there was almost nobody at the office, so I could really work easily by myself. Now I notice that the sounds of the keyboards rattling and mice buttons clicking keeps bugging me off. Not sure why, though. Usually I get the feeling when I’m tired. And now it’s monday and I won’t admit being tired after nice and refreshing weekend. Luckily there’s Spotify and earphones. 😀

During the holiday I was more or less online all the time, which can be seen as a good or bad. But as my friend has told me, everything has its good and bad drawbacks. I myself found the holiday really good and refreshing. Both on personal and professional level.

As you might know, I’m working as Test Engineer in QA/Test consultant company. The thing is that I got a phone call and an email during my first holiday week telling me I got an interview with a potential (and really interesting) client next monday, if it just suited my plans. Well, it did. I went to the interview and ended up having a test exam delivered to me the next day. Not completely unexpected, for they were looking for test developers.

I’ve been in  a similar situation before, last year at Spotify and that did not go too well. Or at least I found something I was not capable of doing. Regardless on the training I’ve taken and the education I have, my development capabilities were far from perfect. I did my best ( at the time) and came up with solution made with bash -scripts.

This time, though, I decided to really give it a shot with a decent language. I did have my Python -training   last year, for test automation purposes the language feels still to be really good one. Sadly I did not have any possibility to start using it at my previous work. Well, I might have could, but I never did even try. Besides that I did stick up with my old habits (and bash -scripts), which really rarely leads to anything new and exiting. 

So I went and jump into Python. Ended up doing some Python -related stuff few hours per day for around 10 days. With some breaks, for it still was my holiday 😉 It basically meant I did work around 3 days with Python and ended up with one solution. Then I got back at work and noticed I could make it a little bit better before delivering to the client. Which I did.

Now that the version is delivered I can see it’s not perfect. They rarely are. So at least I’ve got something to work with still.

This all has been really interesting. Getting inside the development, even for test purposes, has been an eye opener. More or less it seems that this has been the one tool missing from my case. So in that way I really do understand using my own time on learning and getting inside Python. For now on it will definitely be easier for me to adapt to that kind of situation. Besides that, now I can keep up learning myself more and more. I suppose that is the best way to do it. To build up and maintain the competence while I still can. My target is now to keep on developing something with Python daily. The same thing I’ve had my writing; I’ll need to create a new habit out of it. By that way I’ll keep up my touch to the language and hopefully will get my competence built up more and more every day. Well at least weekdays. Weekends are still worth to be used with family 😀

Now I’m not saying people should use their own time doing job -related stuff, and I myself don’t see I was doing it like that. I just used the work as an excuse for getting an uplift for my own competence. And (you might argue with this) my competence is not made only for work purposes, it is something I can use in my everyday life, somehow, too. Even if I won’t sit down and code I can learn myself how to get to know new stuff and that won’t hurt in the real life situations either.

Now, few tips:

1. Eclipse & pyDev is a brilliant couple. I did myself use ADT Bundle for Eclipse for we need Android development environment for test automation purposes.
2.  Stackoverflow has been a brilliant source of information when in need. And I’ve been using it a lot 😀
3. In case you need to add plot graph on your web site (I need to) it seems matplotlib could do the trick.  Here’s how to get it installed in OS X Mountain Lion

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
$ brew doctor
$ brew install python
$ export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/share/python:$PATH
$ easy_install pip
$ brew install gfortran
$ pip install numpy
$ pip install scipy
$ brew install pkg-config
$ brew install freetype
$ brew install libpng
$ pip install matplotlib
$ python
>>> import numpy
>>> import scipy
>>> import matplotlib