I’ve graduated – hurray! It’s time to get a job. But it will be difficult for me to find a job that allows me to use what I studied at university. The good thing is that I know the basics of object-oriented programming and have some life experience.

My goal is to get a job in a company which will help me become a good specialist; not where they just give out tasks and show “do-what-you-like-with-it” attitude, but where they offer advice on a better way of doing it. A couple of hours of web surfing and “the target is acquired”.

EDISON Software Development Centre, with its good specialists, is just what is needed. Reading through the requirements – alas, my knowledge is on the small side, but the information about the company is impressive. My conclusion is I need to study more.

A couple of months spent poring over books and here I am at my first job interview. Needless to say they couldn’t do without teasing me about my want of knowledge, but the goal is achieved – I got a test task! It is easier to learn by practicing. Besides, “I am almost God with Google”. The test task seems rather easy (I had more difficult term papers at university).

But it turned out that it wasn’t as simple as it seemed. The first version needed to be complemented with a couple of details and that’s where problems started to appear. But I’m still working.

After the second and the third iteration more and more functionality had to be added. That’s where I begin to understand that the “old” ways won’t do here; and the code is becoming too hard to read.

Together with one of the new add-ons to the task (they’ve asked for more functionality) I learn about templates – a great thing they are by the way. As a result: a couple of books, google and, of course, my persistence and aspiration have done their job – my test task is accepted.

Looking back, I realise that I’ve learned more about Android applications development while working on the task than during five years of study. A special thanks for that! One more job interview and the day is mine!

My first day at work: getting to know internal code of conduct, legal paperwork, reading and signing the job description documents; no time for programming anyway. The second day is quieter; I get a chance to work!

I really wanted to get a part of some big task, but my expectations were confounded. I got my first task – a small internal project (it seemed to be small after a couple of weeks’ work on it). My first thought was: “Wait a minute! There’s something wrong… I was getting a job as a java-programmer, and here I encounter very little java but a lot of other things.

But I think about Google, get myself together and buckle down. Slowly but steadily I continue working on; fortunately, there are people I can turn to and ask (I have already pestered the life out of my colleagues, and Google will soon start recognising me).

A week has passed and the project no longer seems so scary. My knowledge is still barely enough, but I read and work, and read and work. When the task seemed to be ready, there were a couple (well, not exactly a couple) of bugs found during the testing. I continue by studying software testing and start correcting. That turns out to be pretty difficult!

It’s far from editing a 100 line code program at university! But even this task is achievable. But what a relief when you understand that here is your first serious project. It’s not a patch on labs and course papers.

The result of the first month of work: java – got the hang of it and learned a lot of new stuff, js – can even write a small script, java xml mapping — have heard about it previously, but haven’t seen; now I even know how it works and where to use it. All in all, I like everything so far: the team is considerate, the tasks are challenging, and there is room to grow. So, we shall live and see!

Dmitriy Suchkanov