So much to learn, so little time

anandi — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 04:47:00 GMT

Our Thanksgiving trip to Tucson was very nice. My husband and I drove back to Seattle, which I had anticipated to be a nice leisurely drive, but turned into a "let's just get home", boring freeway, 12-15 hours a day sort of road trip. On the bright side, we did manage to hit In-N-Out Burger for lunch one day, and saw some friends in the Bay Area.

We're coming up to a pretty quiet time at work. A lot of folks are forced to take vacation or else they'll lose it. Microsoft will let you carry over a year's worth of vacation. It's surprising to me how many people don't take all of their vacation and thus run the risk of losing some at the end of the year. Maybe that means I'm a slacker. I've got just a few days of vacation left this year. (And I don't mean that those are the days I'll forfeit - that's actually all I have to carry over.)

Now I'm starting to dig into some real work and feeling a little less useless. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm adding huge value to the team, but I'm definitely moving out of "just learning" mode. Slowly. I'm putting together a "Vision and Scope" document for a project I've been given and working with the User Assistance (UA) guys, learning about their tools and processes and what we've done in the past for the SMS SDK.

I often wish I could fast-forward to be 6 or 9 months into the job, at that point where I'm clear about what I'm doing, confident enough to speak up at meetings, and just generally feeling like I have it together. Now I've just got this nagging stressed out feeling that I'm picking things up too slow and not working hard enough (doesn't help that I'm here only 3 days a week). I suppose those are just normal things that happen with joining a new team, as well as starting a part time schedule.

At some point in the not too distant future, I hope to post about our upcoming SDK for System Center Configuration Manager 2007. I've got a list of features that I'm responsible for in the SDK docs and code samples so I'm trying to come up to speed on the biggest one: software distribution. It's a great place to start since it's the heart of SMS. That also makes it huge and complicated but that's sure better than being bored.

So, does anyone out there have any thoughts about the SMS SDK? Have you downloaded it from the Microsoft Download Center?

Anandi’s Thoughts : SDK

So much to learn, so little time