I’ve been working on automating all the installations for my team. I went in with high hopes, thinking that I could quickly finish the project and move on to more fun and exciting things.

How wrong I was. The difficulties are numerous:

• I do not have any of the domain knowledge for the project – Other people know how these things work and what they do, but not I. So I have no idea what is crucial and what isn’t.
• I did not have any idea how MSI packages work – while not crippling, it has delayed me, causing me to take a long long time to figure out how to do a simple thing.
• I have to rely on other people to test my work – finding out if I solved a problem or not is always dependant on someone else’s schedule.

I’ve learned from this to make sure that I identify and collaborate with those who have domain knowledge early in the project. Request specific expectations of the project and the timeline. Prepare myself better for deployment by requesting a way to test my own success.

On the upside, I’ve written my first app that will actually get used by anyone here. It sets up files to get deployed and logs it.

I’m so excited!