PRJ – Introduction

Friday 31/07: 8:30AM – 4PM

Yesterday marked my first day of work placement at MLC Group in Motueka. I started off with a brief meeting on Microsoft Teams and then got straight into setting up my development environment. MLC Group has multiple different applications that help the functioning of the factory. New applications need to be made and existing applications need to be maintained.

I will primarily be working with JavaScript and C#. Most front-end clients are written in React. Some of the newer backend applications are working with GraphQL. We are using Azure DevOps as version control and Wryke as a task-management. Most applications are using an Microsoft SQL Server database.

After installing Visual Studio, VS Code, MSSQL Server Manager, Git, Node, Yarn and the required browser and VS Code extensions, I was able to clone my first repository to my laptop. My first task was to fix a date which was displaying an incorrect value, this required me to change one variable name in the React frontend so it was an easy start. After cloning the required application to my laptop I checked out a new branch, made the required change, made a commit and opened a pull request for the changes to be integrated into the master branch.

The next task was to ensure two lists in an application were ordered A-Z / 1 – 10. The first list was easy since the list consisted of strings, a quick sort on the array did the trick. The second list was also relatively straight forward but was made up of strings which started with a two to three digit number. I had to split the string and compare the numbers to see which was greater. After completing the task, I made a commit and opened another pull request.

The third task was more involved. I had to add a new input field to an exisiting input form on an application. This required me make changes in both the frontend, backend and database itself. Jesse helped me get started by creating a database migration to add the new field to the database table. Thats about as far as I got on that task before it was time to leave.

It was very interesting to see how an IT team works together in a workplace as well as seeing their codebase. Some parts of their applications looked familiar just much larger then anything I have worked on before. There React clients also looked quite different to how I have been using React, it nearly looked like a different framework in itself. Some of their C# backends looked similar to the API we made in SDV701 with Mattias, just much larger.

Overall a very interesting start to my work placement and I look forward to returning on Monday.