First Committ at New Job

I'm not sure if you're aware, but in February of this year, I accepted an offer for a Software Engineer role at Premier International. They are a small, data-migration company located in the downtown Chicago. Prior to my June 1st start date, I was very anxious about getting started and writing some actual code.

One of my responsibilities include maintaining and improving their in-house software that the consultants use to migrate their client's data. You can read more about the software here. The back-end code is written in COBOL and C++, and the front end is written in VB6 and C#. However, one of the features for next update is porting the GUI into all C# code. Very exciting.

I have been working here for exactly one month, and today I finally made my first code change that got committed into the working source code! It was a COBOL bug fix that took about a week to fix. And much of it I was working with a Senior Engineer. Regardless, once the bug got sorted out and working, I got to add my name and comments to the change log, and push my changes to the code-base!

It might not seem like much, but to me this is one of the proudest moments of my life. It's starting to feel like all the school and learning is actually coming together, and I am finally writing some professional, enterprise level code. If anything, this might serve as a source of inspiration to someone else who feels lost or unmotivated. I am telling you firsthand that all the late nights coding away are worth it to get to this point. Trust me.