I am currently working on two official projects and one volunteer project for the Safeco Foundation Organization.
Data Mining
My number one priority is to learn SAS and be the center of technical support for the tool in case something happens. Though, this is not what I really applied for as a developer at Safeco, however, it gives me an opportunity to work from a very high level architectural point of view.
Soon, this project will go live, and the tool will be installed, and I will get to play around with the tool and be an expert at it. My interest is to be able to develop some SAS code at work, but that is currently out of scope for my role and project. Perhaps, I can help come up with ideas on writing some applications for the business users, but this is speaking in about three months from now...
I might be repeating myself, but this is not what I would imagine doing as a developer after graduation, I was hoping to dig into .NET or Java development. Instead, I am learning a lot of different technologies that I was not interfaced with in school such as Xythos, NAS, Polyserve, n-Tier applications, etc. My work involves taking all the different technologies (already written by programmers from third party vendor) and glues them together. I keep on hearing this in my team, and every time I hear it, I would think to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice if I can be one of the persons that write the technology and then the rest can do the gluing?"
Open Seas
Since I have shown my lack of interest in the "planning phase" of the Data Mining project, my boss decided to send me off to another team for couple days a week. There I was able to develop a .NET application that detects bad data. I'm not going into the details about the application, but it's much better than doing the planning for my Data Mining project because I have always been more of a "doing" person rather than a "talking" person.
The good thing about working for Open Seas is that I get to do coding, no politics, working in a much smaller environment. However, three is only one resource on the project and that would be me, and this is where it begins to hit because I felt like there was almost no communication between me and..me. There were help from others at the beginning, but others showed more interest towards other projects rather than mine, that unfortunately discouraged me a little bit. Anyhow, I still find this project to be fun and challenging and not only that it gives me an opportunity to learn to work on my own, though it would be nice if there were couple developers on this project instead of just one.
Foundation Project
This is a volunteer project that the CIO from Safeco assigned to a group of three campus recruits, and one of the campus recruits is me. This project is fun because it's a side project and it gives me a chance to learn to work with my peers.
Which project is the best?
...
