wrote journal entries

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diff --git a/hireme/final-pres.tex b/hireme/final-pres.tex
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+\nopagenumbers
+\setbox0=\hbox{\vrule}
+\newdimen\leftwid\leftwid=2in
+\newdimen\rightwid
+\rightwid=6.5in
+\advance\rightwid by -\leftwid
+\advance\rightwid by -3\wd0
+\advance\rightwid by -16pt % padded box
+\def\tr{\noalign{\hrule\penalty-5}}
+\def\link#1{#1}
+\long\def\pad#1{\vtop{\hbox{\hskip4pt #1\hskip 4pt}\vskip 4pt}}
+\parindent5pt
+\halign{\vrule\pad{\vtop{\emergencystretch.5in\hsize\leftwid\unskip #\ignorespaces}}\vrule&
+              \strut\pad{\vtop{\hsize\rightwid\unskip #\ignorespaces}}\vrule\cr\tr
+    Name&
+        Holden Rohrer\cr\tr
+    Internship location and site supervisor's name&
+        7Factor, Chelsea Green\cr\tr
+    Please describe your main duties and responsibilities at the
+    Internship site, what you are doing, and why&
+        I was responsible for analyzing existing code and writing new
+        code to fix bugs and add new features, in response to
+        ``stories'' that are written by the 7Factor sales team based on
+        customer requests or predicted needs.\cr\tr
+    Reason for your choice of Internship in this career field&
+        I want to be a software developer in my professional career, so
+        I was interested in getting hands-on experience with a project
+        that people actually use, instead of the more toy-like projects
+        that I've previously worked on.\cr\tr
+    Personal characteristics and lessons you learned from this
+    semester's internship experience&
+        \noindent Characteristics about yourself that you learned from the
+        internship:\par
+        {\parindent0pt\leftskip5pt
+            I learned that
+        \par}
+        \noindent Major lessons you learned from the internship:\par
+        {\parindent0pt\leftskip5pt
+            I learned that
+        \par}
+        \cr\tr
+    What was the greatest thing you got to do, learn, or see through
+    your internship?&
+        ??\cr\tr
+    How did this internship impact you?&
+        bruh\cr\tr
+    Is there anything else you want us to know about your internship
+    site, site supervisor, and/or experience?&
+        No\cr\tr
+    {\bf Video Link:}&
+        \link{https://hrhr.dev/hireme-final.webm}\cr\tr
+}
+\bye
diff --git a/hireme/journal1.tex b/hireme/journal1.tex
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+\font\twelverm=ptmr7t at 12pt
+\twelverm
+\baselineskip=24pt
+\nopagenumbers
+\headline={\hfil Rohrer \number\pageno}
+{\obeylines
+Holden Rohrer
+Ms Rosner
+Hire Me
+1 Apr 2021}
+
+% Describe how you are preparing for your interview. Consider several
+% questions you would ask your new supervisor and write them out. (If
+% you have already started, please describe what happened in your
+% interview. What questions were you able to ask and what were the
+% answers?)
+
+\centerline{Journal Prompt \#1: Interview Questions}
+
+During my interviews, I spoke with Mr.~Phil Muldoon and Mr.~Jeremy
+Duvall over the phone.
+Both went well and I learned more about the 7Factor company from them.
+I asked them questions about the processes 7Factor uses to develop
+software and what I'd be working on in the two interviews.
+My interview with Mr.~Muldoon, the HR point of contact, mostly covered
+some basic details about the internship and setting up a second
+interview wih Jeremy, although the second interview did still take a
+significant amount of back-and-forth over email to set up (the schedules
+misaligned, and the time didn't get fully communicated to Jeremy, me,
+and Ms.~Hall at the same time).
+The basic information covered in my intervew was about how long the
+interview would be (until the end of the school year) and other
+questions.
+He also told me that I'd be working on the WellEntry project with people
+who work at 7Factor and repeated some of the marketing pitch of the
+company.
+7Factor is a company that's focused on modern development practices and
+creating good products.
+
+One of the questions I asked Jeremy was ``what development process does
+7Factor use?/What is kanban?'' (I only learned these two questions had
+the same answer after I had asked them both).
+Kanban is a method of software development where the sales team or other
+programmers will find work that needs to be done (like refactoring a
+program to be easier to work on, or creating a new feature for a
+client), and post it on a public ``billboard'' or ``signboard'' like
+Trello (7Factor uses Clubhouse) where anybody can start working on a
+``story.'' 
+A story is the name for a small, well-divided task that a team member
+can start working on, mostly independently from other developers until
+the time for revisions or code reviews come.
+
+Code review is part of the 7Factor process in order to ensure
+good-quality code across the board.
+One of the guiding principles of the company is ``kaizen,'' or
+continuous improvement.
+I got a chance to ask Jeremy about this principle, and constructive
+(keyword) criticism's one of the guiding principles.
+So that 7Factor can build good code, people need to understand where
+they're able to improve, and where projects are able to get better,
+candidly, but very much still kindly.
+
+Another question I asked Jeremy about was the typical tech stack on a
+project and what I'd be working on.
+WellEntry is all-JavaScript, which is becoming more and more common, so
+it's an interesting set of tools to work with.
+The front-end is written in Vue, one of the older frameworks with
+full support for reactivity and a lot of helpful tooling above the bare
+metal.
+The back-end is written with ActionHero to manage requests from users as
+independently threaded programs, and Sequelize to interface with the
+database backend for storing data (users, users' roles, vaccination
+records, surveys or COVID tests, etc).
+This means that a lot of the skills from this project will be
+transferable in the future.
+More generally, 7Factor deals with a lot of different tech stacks and
+languages, often working with companies to upgrade old stacks to more
+modern ones that are easier to work on.
+This means that you'd probably see JS a lot, but also Python, Java, C\#,
+and others.
+And, since 7Factor uses Infrastructure-as-Code techniques with putting
+nearly every project on a repeatable CI/CD pipeline and cloud
+deployment, the Terraform-specific configuration files near every
+project.
+
+\bye
diff --git a/hireme/journal3.tex b/hireme/journal3.tex
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+++ b/hireme/journal3.tex
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+\font\twelverm=ptmr7t at 12pt
+\twelverm
+\baselineskip=24pt
+\nopagenumbers
+\headline={\hfil Rohrer \number\pageno}
+{\obeylines
+Holden Rohrer
+Ms Rosner
+Hire Me
+2 Apr 2021}
+
+% The top three descriptors site supervisors use to describe good
+% interns include: enthusiastic, confident, and respectful. Describe how
+% you are embodying these descriptors presently at your internship site
+% and how you hope to embody them in your future career pursuits.
+
+% Also, entering a work environment can easily be compared to entering a
+% foreign county. The people around you speak a different language, have
+% spoken and unspoken politics, and cultural norms. How have you
+% navigated your internship culture?
+
+\centerline{Journal Prompt \#3: Work Environment}
+
+The Euroamerican work environment is designed to be consistent and
+polite.
+The American variant of ``professionalism'' is inherited from American
+sales culture.
+Sales is about communicating three main themes to your customer:
+dependability, courtesy, and sincerity, often without particular regard
+to the specific nature of the object of the sale.
+Interviews, meetings, and nearly any form of non-casual discussion
+become wrapped up in the language and structure of a sales pitch.
+Because sales is rarely concerned with objective or even clear
+communication of its object, neither are meetings, interviews, or work
+communication.
+Much discussion functions as virtue signalling, so buzzwords and
+monstrously opaque conglomerations like ``multifaceted, comprehensive
+solution'' abound.
+Real communication ends up hidden in coded phrases, and distinct from
+foreign languages, obfuscated by words or entire sentences that serve no
+substantive purpose.
+
+Fortunately, this trend is not universal or absolute.
+I'm enthusiastic about the work I'm doing, and in order to effectively
+produce software, I need to communicate substantively.
+While often run through a politeness filter, I'm discussing the features
+and functionality and issues of the program I'm working on, WellEntry,
+with other people on the team.
+I generally try to write concisely, which unfortunately contradicts with
+``work language,'' meaning I spend much longer writing a response than I
+would otherwise need to casually, especially because this writing also
+needs to communicate virtues like openness to critique and humility.
+
+This translation impedes oral communication less than writing because
+mistakes are more readily forgotten, but it isn't free of professional
+euphemism.
+Non-committal phrases like ``if it is necessary, which it could be not''
+occupy some of the space.
+Interestingly, the mental costs of switching language are nearly
+immaterial: the process of code-switching is practically automatic, so
+staying to this subset of English naturally communicates and forces one
+to only consider ideas which embody ``enthusiastic, confident, and
+respectful.''
+I will, necessarily, continue to use this style of language in my future
+career, and depending on the available content (or lack thereof) to
+discuss, embellish with empty words.
+Works like Strategic Vision Plans are especially vulnerable to such
+empty language, but I fortunately am not party to any such document, and
+7Factor's particular culture seems to be less affected by those styles
+(but not entitrely free of it).
+
+Non-verbal norms are also important.
+The language of body and attire were irrelevant during this internship
+due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but a unique part of this work is code
+reviews.
+7Factor does theirs through GitHub mostly, but extra comments also end
+up on Clubhouse, and a lot of communication happens in the mechanical
+interactions with these systems.
+Processes like ``requesting'' or ``re-requesting'' a review, or marking
+a project as ``In Development'' or ``Ready for Production'' are
+seemingly trivial processes which are actually moderately nuanced.
+One possible concern is the time that other people can allocate to
+looking at the code I've written: before I mark a piece of code as
+``completed'' or even mention it to my supervisor or other developers
+working on the same project, I need to be confident that it's functional
+and finished before marking it as such, in order to demonstrate respect
+for their time.
+
+\iffalse
+- Why are work environments' language so opaque?
+- Politeness as an ideal
+- I'm enthusiastic
+- I focus on quality of work and participating in the team
+- Return to code-switching (general) and professional euphemisms
+- Non-linguistic norms
+- Software teams existing before the proliferation of %bull$#*!
+\fi
+
+\bye