Exactly six months ago was my first ever day at a full time job. I was understandably nervous, hardly knew anything about working in a big company and had no idea about how to tackle seemingly huge design issues which I was introduced to in the first week. I wasn’t worried about the latter because that is exactly what I came here to learn.

I am probably slotted to have a 6-month review meeting with my manager soon, but I am not sure if that will happen or not because I did have one 3-month review which wasn’t really planned. And the fact that I’ve had one review meeting, I am absolutely comfortable at the thought of having the second one, if that happens now. One reason for that is I am quite satisfied with my performance so far, not top notch (I can certainly do better), but good enough. Secondly, and more importantly I am lucky to have a really cool manager, who thought I was doing well at our earlier review.

Regardless of what the company review holds, I did a quick self-review to see how far I’ve come in these last 6 months. Result: I’ve covered a lot of ground. From having absolutely no idea about environment variables in Linux and not knowing that merely selecting by mouse copies the item and middle click pastes it, I now feel at home using Linux, so much that I hardly use my Windows machine at work. Having never scripted before, now I am quite proficient in Python, know that TCL is a pain in the ass and okay working in Perl. So much so that whenever I see repetition in anything I write a quick Python script to do the work for me. Obviously, task management and scheduling is done there too.

Now the major part of the job is hardware design in VHDL and within a day after starting proper design, I wrote more VHDL code than I did in my entire time at uni. I’ve learned some of the tricks the pros use to optimize the design, although there is a long long way to go here. I’ve also been given various design parts with some tentative deadlines, which makes me feel good.

Although I have come a long way in these six months, I also have a list of things which I specifically want to learn and excel in. It will take time, but I have a feeling I am on track.

I cannot thank Allah enough for making this easy, fun, informative and exactly as I wanted (a dream job).