Its nearly time for my 24 week report so I’ve been at Lockheed for nearly 6 months now.

I’ve spent the last 3 months working with the Architecture team on a pilot project for the MoD, in this I have learnt how to code in C#, interface with Salamander’s MooD API, had a weeks trip to Valley Forge, USA.

What have I learnt about software development?

Requirements are useful
I coded the majority of the software, I have seen no actual requirements for the software, no actual design. The application became the design and the design frequently got changed with lead to me doing the same thing multiple times, therefore I can see the value in Requirements capture, and adding penalties for the customer changing requirements.

Documentation is useful
The majority of the coding I did to interact with the MooD database was without any API documentation, and unlike all products I have worked with before there are no code samples online. I finally got the 2007 documentation about a month ago which was nice as I could finally see how to access objects rather than guessing all the time.

What have I learnt about the US?

Don’t try sarcasm
It doesn’t appear to work the other side of the Atlantic.

Don’t go there if trying to lose weight or have a small apetite
The portions are about 3x what you’d expect even a salad can arrive on a plate the size of the table.