Exactly 2 months at IBM

Wow I don't even know where to start; it has been so long since the last update. This will probably be a long entry. Exactly 2 months ago, my internship at IBM started with a half-day orientation session, followed by a few days of administrative issues and setting up of my workstation. I joined right when IBM was testing for its release of DB2 ver. 9.7 and TE (Technology Explorer) ver. 3.5.

For the first few weeks, my main task was to get familiar with TE and how it works with/connects to DB2, as well as picking up PHP. To be honest, it felt like I was getting nowhere, although my team mates assured me that I was making progress. At the end of May, I had to take a week off to fly back to Japan for a friend's wedding, and when I came back to work, it was already time for regression testing of TE 3.5.

The purpose of the tests were to ensure compatibility with DB2 ver. 9.7 as well as previous releases of DB2, compatibility with various browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, etc.), and that features available in the previous TE version still worked in 3.5. During testing, numerous bugs were reported, and as I helped find some of them, I finally felt that I was actually contributing something to the team.

After regression testing, I also helped with what we call "dynamic columns" a.k.a. "delta columns" in TE 3.5. These columns are configurable by the user so that TE can perform min/max/average type calculations on any column value over time intervals (e.g. number of reads per second). My goal was to create a GUI test on TE to see that these columns were being calculated properly, as well as fix (with MUCH help of my team mate -- so much, that my manager and connection coach joked about extending a workstation at his cubicle).

On June 19, TE 3.5 was released according to plan on SourceForge, without any visible rushing to my surprise, unlike submissions of school group projects (haha). There were Timbits for celebration (we also had a team BBQ which I missed because of Future Blue Day, an activities day for interns, which was FUN and I made some new friends, but cost turning 3 shades darker despite multiple layers of sunscreen), and my team mate dropped by to inform me that my name was in the credits as "owner of the dynamic columns." It never even occurred to me that my name would be publicized in an official IBM product. Flattering, but also scary!!

Since the release, I've been studying for the DB2 v.9 Fundamentals Certification Exam and working on a new project for TE/DB2. This time it's in C. Working with this team involves dealing with many languages (JavaScript, PHP, XML, HTML, SQL, and C) and features, and I like the diversity of my tasks. I'm also making use of a lot of what I learned in the past year or so of classes (mostly csc209, csc369, csc301, and csc343). The SQL knowledge from csc343 (Databases course) definitely came in handy during the Certification Exam. In fact, I just took it 7 hours ago, and I am now DB2 v.9 certified! :)