Yes, I’ve been damn busy the last weeks. I’m not used to studying and doing homework anymore, and time management was never one of my strengths. Still, I seem to handle my first semester courses pretty well. I spend about 25 hours per week (!) at lectures, tutorial groups, and study groups. Doing homework and learning for exams is extra, of course. At the moment, the hardest parts are Technical Basics and Programming Theory, as they obviously are pretty theoretic courses and not that exciting to teach/learn.

I did not do much programming before I decided to study IT. Still, I understand the basic rules of it, e.g. that in Java you always have to conclude a line with a ” ; “, or that you should make sure that there is some case that ends your loop before you test it. Anyways, I am one of the bloody newbies considering programming in the mass that is my fellow students (we’re about 690 – only counting those who START studying IT this autumn). So I decided to take part in an optional tutorial group for programming. First meeting was yesterday.

After 30 minutes, I was close to leaving, as I was not sure at all how I should solve the task. Today there will be a tutorial on Java basics, so I thought it might be better if I did that tutorial before cracking my head by trying to solve this exercise. But in the end, I got a working program. Not on my own, but that’s okay. I cooperated with another student who was struggling hard, too. And the tutor was ok with it, he only pointed out that the University would use a plagiarism-scanner on our submissions, so in any case we would have to re-write the code and make some changes.

This was the exercise:
Write a program that can scan a textfile containing an ASCII-picture. The program should finish after the last line and then state the lenght and broadth of the picture, length being the number of lines, broadth the number of symbols per line. If one line was too short, the program should stop and state “INPUT MISMATCH”.

Stating length and number of signs of something you put into the prompt was by far the easiest part. Boy, it took us some time to get the program to read the file.

But, step by step, we worked our way through the problems we encountered, and finally, after about 1.5 hrs, the program was finished 🙂

So the only thing I now have to do is get moving and make some changes to the code.

Yay!

In the last days, we had 2 units Maths, 2 units Algorithm Introduction, 2 units General Introductions and 2 units of Introduction into Programming. Each has a “?” in its title, to show that the units should prepare us to what is coming forth during the next weeks and months. Whew.

Yesterday, I not only bought the script for the Maths units (again, the whole thing is NOT compulsory!), but also had a look into the exercises given. As the Propädeutikum was shortened by 50 % from last year to now, the script contains more information than the actual lectures. And that’s good. Because if the script contained only what the professor told us so far and will tell us during the next days, there would be a lot I would have to search for in my Maths stuff from school. And those documents are well hidden in some dark corner of my cellar back home in Tirol, if they still exist.

I will have to repeat Maths. A lot.

That’s one thing I learned during those days. Another thing: professors are at least as geeky and nerdy as their students. During these introductionary lessons, there’s been a lot of jokes on viral videos (double rainbow!), BBT, Futurama and the even The Hitchhiker’s Guide.

I like these people.

It took me some time to pronounce this right, and also to remember the name of it. A nicer, shorter and better-to-understand name for it is “Prolog”.

This is what will occoupy me throughout the first week at University. It is kind of mandatory for all students who start studying information technology at UT Vienna, so I will have to go, too.

Most of the programme sounds interesting or at least good-to-know, like explaining the level of mathematics they want to work with or build on; also, first steps of programming and the introduction to algorithms sound interesting. The only question is: at what level will they start – in programming, but especially in maths? Programming we ought to start at the beginning, as many people did not attend special technical schools before. But for maths, there should be “Maturaniveau” – but I never took A-levels in maths.

I am getting nervous.

The last 16 months have been great. In private, but also in working life. The team at the Software Company is way more a team than I have experienced before. There is more chatting, more fun, more laughter, and more “let’s do something after work”. I’ve watched a soccer game with my boss and the graphics designer during the World Cup last year, we’ve had some glasses of wine after work either for birthdays or just because we could, we’ve had a great skiing weekend together, and so on and so on.

The only way to end this, of course, is with another get2gether. On Thursday, I will bring some wine, Severin said he’d bring Strudel, and then we will have some drinks on my becoming a student and Tanja being a new part of the team.

That’s the spirit.

That’s it. Six working days to go: Friday, and then one more week. And then I’m off. Off to University!

I promised to keep you updated about my successor … so here’s the promised update!

Tanja is a nice, young girl. A bit shy and not too self-confident, as this is her first real job. She’s clever and attentive, so I think she will also soon improve her technical understanding and skills. My impression upon first sight was – and I am really ashamed for that – full of prejudice: Tanja is a pretty girly girl, with fake fingernails, colored hair, her total style and appearance very different from mine. I did not think she could make it. But after working together during the last 2 weeks, I think she for sure has the potential to get this job done!

It can be incredibly funny to be responsible for Customer Relations. Though sometimes, you can’t help but think “WTF” pretty loudly:

Whi can not download aplication that do not cost anything
. Although i have a password and email contract for Blackbarry. Error number  that appers is: 30601 with the massage ” unable to validate the email  address and the password combination.

Now, what in the seven hells could be the problem?

One week after sending the “We would like to have you working with us”-message, we still have not heard of my successor, so the spot is vacant again. Anybody looking for a job like mine?

A successor has been found.

I don’t know too much about her until now. She’s from Tirol, and in case she accepts the offer, she will be moving to Vienna. I know her name, and her contact details, but have not met her or talked to her until now. She obviously was either the only person applying for the job, or the best, as she was the only one who came around for an interview.

We will see, hopefully she will start on September 1st.

For all of you who want to know more about my past: there’s a new page available!

It’s about my time at the Software Company and everything that happened in the last year (and something).

Go for it!