Testing, testing

[selenay]

So. Test yesterday. On the one hand, I did better than expected. It was a "here's a pen, here's very tough written test, tell us everything you know" deal and it focused on all the aspects of Java that I didn't know, virtually nothing on J2SE. Despite this, I managed to answer some questions including several on JDBC, which I have never touched and which I was able to guess at from my knowledge of relational databases and distributed computing. Go me!

However, my score wasn't quite high enough and they won't be asking me back :-( But it wasn't as low as I thought it would be and now I have a better idea of where to start with J2EE.

After meeting terrylbirch for a consolitary lunch, I wandered off to hunt down some bookstores and ended up in Picadilly Waterstone's for two hours. Definitely a place to hit if you're visiting London and love books :-) Took down some titles of books that look good for getting started with J2EE and will be buying one when I've got PHP/MySQL mastered. Also picked up some pocket references for PHP, MySQL and CSS so that I don't have to keep flicking through the big books when I need a quick glance at properties or methods.

Such a geek.

I worked on Under Green Hills for a while last night and have hit a section that needs some serious re-writing. That will probably be my task this evening. Also spent forty-five minutes debugging a PHP script where the major fault turned out to be an omitted space character in a string. Yay! But the PHP/MySQL thing is going well and at some time soon I'm going to be setting up a poll to get some feedback on features that users of the review site are particularly interested in before I get to heavily into designing it.

Comments

[gmul.livejournal.com]

Shame about the test. Hardly fair of them to ask you questions you didn't know the answer to though! :-) What did you think of the place otherwise though? You don't sound like it was such as great loss not to get as the place a little while ago...

[selenay]

Well, the questions that I couldn't answer problem mainly stems from the agency apparently throwing every candidate they get at the job and hoping that one might stick. The job description I got last night specifically said advanced J2EE knowledge needed and I specifically stated to the agency that I had only covered J2SE. Not really feeling much trust in that agency anymore. Thankfully, I haven't spotted them advertising any other roles that I might be interested in.

I didn't get the same vibe that I got from the place last week. Didn't see much of the office, but it felt very big and corporate (huge, huge building complete with glass covered atrium - eep!). Obviously I can't turn down positions just because they don't feel right, but I didn't have that "I *really* want to work here" feeling and so wasn't particularly disappointed. Ho, hum, onwards and upwards.

Still have a few days before that other company contacts me. So I can keep my fruitless hopes alive for a while more :-)