Back to the Present, by the Story from the Past

After such a long hiatus, I've finally got a chance to sit long enough with nothing left to do beside writing in this blog again. Hahaha.. It's quite pathetic actually, with all the excitement before and promise that I'll write as much as I can, and still ends up with only 4 posts.

I have to think of a good excuse reason to explain this, and there's one actually.

Started from January, 21th to be exact, I have a job. Yes, a real job with a real actual company. As you may know (or not) that since my graduation, I haven't got any job in a company before. Sure I had an experience as a web application programmer (it's not really my field and I was deeply struggling with it) before, but maybe most people don't think that as a real job. Yup, we prefer the term project to describe it. Anyway, there's a huge difference between the two of them. Working in a project, especially the one that related to online application, and working in a company. And honestly, I prefer the former.

In my project before, I don't have an exact/routine schedule to meet my employer. I can set my own schedule and pace, and I don't even have to leave my room! That's what I love most of working in a project before. Yeah sure, it's not unusual that I have to pull an all-nighter working because of sudden changes on the deadline or the program itself. But I prefer that kind of job that saves my time of commuting from home to work place, with a routine schedule that can easily depletes my energy. The drawbacks are of course, like  I mentioned before, things are changing and moving rapidly. I have to be able to adjust and adapt very fast, especially cause I'm new to this kind of field.

And what about the latter? It gives me a more stable pace, though it can gets quite hectic sometimes, and the work load is not as heavy as the former. The deadline is usually not as strict as my project before, and I can arrange my job easier. But the problem is, I'm stuck with a routine schedule. I have to go to work in the early morning and come back at night, every single day. I guess I'm still not adapted very well to this kind of habit. And I work at Pulomas while living at Cirendeu, so that's 2 and a half hours travel, on average, for me when I go in the morning. And another 2 and a half hours when I go home.

Nice.

Ugh, okay. Enough with the rambling, I don't want to complain more about my life. Hahaha.. So let's start to get personal. My projects before are related to web application, basically for processing huge chunks of data and presenting it in a various means. I don't know if there's any specific term to that kind of web. It is actually a project from Ministry of Industry of Indonesia (Departemen Perindustrian) for a company, and that certain company gives it to another party to do that job. Luckily, one of my friend, a doctoral student whom I know from my final undergraduate research got that job. She offered me and a couple of other people this projects, and because I certainly didn't have better things to do at that time, I took the offer.

It's quite an experience, I learned many new things such as PHP, and a little bit of JavaScript. I also learned to use Yii and the most important thing is, I think, I took part in a collaborative programming using Mercurial version control system. We actually used TortoiseHg to make our life easier, hehehe.. Using this software, I could experience the greatness of a version control system. And I instantly fell in love with it (this is getting creepy).

Use it. Love it.

It was a very difficult job honestly, and I couldn't keep up fast enough with the flow of the project itself. Fortunately, I only do it for about 2 months. There are 2 projects, the first one is to build a web application to accommodate User Specific Duty Free Scheme in Indonesia-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. The second one is also a web application, but this time for National Agency of Drug and Food Control (Badan Pengawas Obat dan Makanan).

Hmm, this post is getting out of control... I actually intended to write about my current job, but I spent a whole page just to tell about my past projects. Hahahaha.. Well, then this post needs... A continuation!! So let's meet again in part 2 of my daily lives..