I started working at Macquarie yesterday. Went through an induction where there were team activities, presentations and of course free food. Today, I got told what I would be doing.

It seems easy enough, but like everything, it’s all easy when you first hear it.

I have 3 tasks.

First task is to upgrade an existing permission system. Currently users are allocated various permissions given their role. However, if their role were to change, admins would have to manually remove and add permissions. This worked when user base was small, but in order for it to scale a new system would have to be implemented. I would have to create a profiling system, where each user would have 1 profile rather than several different permissions. The profile will then contain the permissions. This way you just have to change the profile rather than changing a dozen or so permissions. Seems easy huh?

Well, I guess the problem I have at the moment is understanding the system. It is quite monstrous (by my standards anyway, probably small compared to some of the other applications). The code is actually quite easy to navigate, it doesn’t contain any javadoc but is intrinsic enough to understand. Hopefully I can work out how the permission system work by this week. It uses hibernate which is an ORM for java, which is extremely funky. Basically turns DB table rows into objects which you can manipulate directly upon.

Two other tasks that I have to do is replace the webware python framework with another framework (possibly cherrypy) and also migrate the system to unix (as opposed to windows).

I stayed back till 6:45pm today, and it’s only been my second day. It was by choice though, nobody forced me to. I’m also sick so I feel like crap.