Thanks all.

I will keep looking and applying, I’m not in a super huge rush, so can afford to take my time and not rush into things like I did with this job.

I should clarify that I know there would be significant work involved learning new languages and skills etc.

But I mean more the process of applying for roles where you have experience but not experience that is directly relevant.

@max19931 I think my current employer might have something to say if I started sharing their source code about.

@mansur85 these guys weren’t HR, it was a dev team leader and one of the project managers.

I can only think it’s because between my family and studying (mature student doing a degree in software development) I don’t have time to go to conferences or do much work on side projects etc.

I mean I’ve spent the last 20 years working in it and the last 5 working my way to my current dev job. Not sure what else they wanted to see.

@Lensflare yeah, my plan is to start with new stuff, and then gradually work back adding tests for existing code slowly overtime.

There isn’t a deadline for completion or anything like that, just doing bits as and when I can.

I fully expect that there will be large chunks where it just won’t be possible to do.

Thanks for the input.

I’ve been contemplating looking at C, I’ve had a bit of dabble this week.

I don’t think it’s necessarily going to help with career progression, but it’s something a bit different that I haven’t done before.

@jfgilmore thanks, that’s what I was thinking. I don’t want to solely go off what would be more useful in the job market, but i know there are 0 Ruby/RoR jobs less than 30 miles away.

My degree, has some PHP and JS etc in my next module, and we go back to Python again for the AI module, so I will get a chance to look at some other stuff as well.

I think I suffer from wanting to try everything rather than picking a couple of things and getting really good at them.

@Lensflare because it often forms part of questions for my uni work.

I.e. write a function that does x,y, and z then explain the complexity etc.

Basically I want to understand the subject better. The degree I am doing is a distance learning one, the materials for this module aren’t great and I want to augment my learning with some good outside resources.

@lungdart compute them.

@arcioneo that’s something that would need to be taken up with the university.

@hjk101 thanks.

I had a break from the assignment for a couple of days, went back to it this morning and cracked it in half an hour.

I could understand the decision if you hadn’t been performing as well in your current role and the felt you need a bit more time before moving up, but if that were the case then your boss, and other teams, wouldn’t have put you forward for it.

We do have to write working code, we have to use a Java ide designed for education and submit the completed projects with the paper.

@10Dev I have to write it, then copy into a word document.

This module normally has a written exam as the final assessment, due to COVID this is open book at home, but that’s not until June.

@alexbrooklyn the more the merrier.

I assume the issue is more with recruitment agencies, who just want to get as many people as possible so they have a better chance on getting their commission.

I guess internal recruitment teams would have a better handle on what they are recruiting for (possibly).

I don’t have any tattoos, but the only time i ever heard of anyone getting in trouble for a visible tattoo was when I was in the army and a guy got one on his neck, because it would be visible when wearing a tunic.

I guess it depends on the country you’re in, where the tattoo is, and whether it is offensive.

Yeah, it’s just frustrating. But it’s been a busy day trying to fix about 10 different things in the legacy .Net application I inherited at work and running around after the baby.

This is on inheritance, at the moment I am completing some classes and methods etc.

I just forgot something really really basic that we covered on day 1.

Thank cold sinking feeling in your stomach as the adrenaline and the fight or flight response kick in is the best.

Lets you know you're alive...

Thanks, by portfolio I mean my GitHub projects etc.

Thanks all, that's kind of what I suspected would be the case.

I'm doing it more for personal development as much as career development, and I guess that even just studying will help to show potential employers that I am willing to better myself and can commit to degree level study etc.

Thanks all, did further investigations, indexes etc were all good, but I'd decided to do some comparisons against a previous version of the program running against the old dB server.

It looks like upgrading SQL fixed some other issues with slow running queries, so now we are left with the fact that the way the program is written isn't very efficient

Thanks all. I'm pretty confident the SQL is ok, one project that takes nearly 2 minutes to load 1900 rows of time through the application, but the query in SQL completes in less than a second. But I will take another look at the indexes etc.

Unfortunately we don't have anything like New relic etc.

I doubt that there's office politics, as my boss is the one who has to answer to our clients (all parts of the same parent company) when things don't work.

She just wants to play things safe, although the worst my scripts can do is fix our indexing issues and improve the performance of the system

@helloworld true, I don't necessarily need a degree, but it was thing that I lack when compared to other candidates when going for new positions.

Mainly it is for personal development, I was a bit of a dick when I was younger and wasted the advantages I had then, so I want to make up for it now.

@ananaszjoe good spot, apparently my phone thinks Gitlab should be girls.

Anyway, I can't modify my post now, so I quite like Gitlabs way of doing it.

Not too shabby.

We have a little nook in the loft that's waiting to be converted into a home office

@jespersh why? It makes more sense to have one unified product than force users to log into different systems to make use of their CI/CD offerings.

If I were a betting man I'd think that Microsoft are gearing up to merge azure DevOps and GitHub.

And end up with one solution which does (almost) everything.

Probably keep the GitHub name but without having to use a second system to access the ci/cd features