This first week has been an interesting one at my internship. It has been strange to be placed in an entirely new environment, where everything is foreign to me. I have settled in to the layout here, but the work I am doing is still new and exciting.
When I arrived, I had to walk through the main office space out to the factory that the company uses to manufacture batteries:
The place where I work is in another room in the lab:
And here is my main battle station:
My advisor set up a company laptop for me to work on. I was started off with a more in-depth introduction to the company and its current projects, along with the code editing software DAVE and a large chunk of their written software. My advisor sent me to an online local task-manager called Kanboard, which everyone here just calls KB, so that he can easily drop tasks to me and I can easily ask all of my questions to understand what I should be doing.
I quickly encountered the problem of not understanding the code fully, so I was given a book on the C programming language. Luckily, it has much in common with Java, and did not take much time or effort to being writing lines. Apparently, I am way better at learning a second programming language than a second spoken language.
The most progress I made was in the editing software DAVE, though. I started to create my first unit tests, and though they are small, they are the first big step towards my project's goal. Overall, it has been wonderful to encounter a new environment, especially one that gives me insight to what I may be doing out of college. I look forward to delving even deeper in to these lines next week, and I hope that I'll see you then too.
Until next time,
Chris Varanese
What is DAVE? What are unit tests?
ReplyDeleteDAVE is just a code editor/compiler that is similar to Eclipse - it makes it easy to write everything out and to make sure it works.
DeleteUnit tests are simply small tests that are performed one by one on a specific segment of code, so they are not all too efficient but most of the time they will get the job done.
My husband says that after he learned his first programming language, all of the rest were much easier. On the other hand, he's never been able to pick up a foreign language. :) Your project sounds interesting and very useful. I'll be interested to see how you implement each of these automated tests.
ReplyDeleteThanks for showing me around the office haha. Good to hear you are picking up C, I too had to pick up a new language. DAVE is really fun to use! Are you working with any DAVE apps in specific?
ReplyDeleteI have no idea, the top says DAVE CE and it all just looks like Eclipse. I think I'm just using the standard development platform (for now at least....).
DeleteIt sounds like you're in the perfect place for your project! Can't wait to hear about everything that you are learning
ReplyDeleteThe factory looks so cool!
ReplyDeleteHow are the unit tests working towards your main goal?
Well, my research consists of looking at three types of testing: unit, integrated, and system. This is the first part of my research.
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