I recently started working and I'm having a tough time. My manager gave me an assignment to change part of the user interface and I find it difficult to know where to even begin because there are thousands of java files and I can't seem to figure out how it all comes together. Any tips? I'm using eclipse btw. I noticed there are easy ways to search and set up break points but even experimenting with these I still feel lost

See if there is a javadoc, look at the comments, or try setting a breakpoint at the beginning (find the main class) and try to understand what happens. Didn't your manager give you any tips to help you out?

Also if your project is well structured there should be a package especially for the UI you can search that

This post was edited by m0hawk on Jun 1 2014 02:30am

1) the dev should be using some sort of logging library, either log4j or similar. set the logging to TRACE or equivalent and it'll help you match what's being called in what order. personally, most of my methods start with a DEBUG and end with a trace. eg:



and my logger is set to print out the class name and timestamp of the log. i'm sure there are ways to automate the logging, maybe using Aspect oriented programming, but it's what i've always done.

2) if you see any strings in the UI (titles, buttons, labels, etc) you can search for them
3) the UI code should be in a separate package from other code.
4) ask another developer for help, preferably the one who wrote the code
5) once you get past the learning curve, it should be a lot simpler.
6) if you still feel out of your league after your summer term is up, you might want another job

The code isn't documented and there are very few (if any) comments throughout the code. The UI has hundreds of packages and its really hard to tell what each one does.

My manager did give me advice of which packages to look over but when I started working on them, I later realize that those were only a small piece of the puzzle


And @carteblanche: I like what you did with the debug / tracing. Unfortunately the methods don't seem to have that type of capability in this project . I should definitely ask for help though

This post was edited by oOn on Jun 1 2014 12:15pm

I would strongly recommend letting your manager know your difficulties. A manager would much rather discover a problem early and try to help you through it rather than have you miss a deadline and come to find out you haven't made and progress. Just my 2 cents, but gl.

Yeah you are absolutely right, luckily my manager has been attentive and put me on the right track- finally making progress now. Being stuck on a problem is scary though

Just remember that the entire point of your internship is for you to learn. They don't expect you to have all the answers. In fact, at the conclusion of your internship when they are considering offering you a full time position your manager will recall that you are a humble, knowledge seeking developer who is not to arrogant or proud to admit he is fallible or doesn't know something.

What you are struggling with is something every new dev to a team struggles with. What pisses me off is when someone is hired onto my team, I give knowledge transfers, architecture overviews, code walk throughs, and do various paired programming activities to attemot to emerse the dev in our code base and then turn him loose only to find a couple weeks later they havent made any progress. Despite every time I catch up with him and ask him how he is doinghe says he is doing fine, but fails to aactually reach out and ask questions when he is stuck. Ugh.

Don't be that guy.

I really do know how you feell. I got myself a 50% job at my univ at an project beginning of 2014. The language the program is written in is C# and I basically had no idea how C# exactly works. I only worked with Java/Android/C/Assembly back then (Im an electric engineer). Thousands of lines of code in vaious packages without a proper documentation in a new language. The struggle was real. It took me about 1 month to understand the basic structure and another moth to really understand all the algorithms and how/why it has been set up that way. Just give it some time and don't hesitate to ask your advisor for help, rather than try to figure out a problem on your own wasting time. Any usefull advice has already been posted. I hope you are moving forward with your project by now

When I was completing my undergrad, every internship had to be approved by the university. You were assigned an internship advisor and had weekly assignments to complete based around your internship. If you weren't satisfied or felt your internship was not providing you with the experience and education you were promised, then there is a clear issue that needs to be addressed. When I had my internship, I took my issue directly to my boss and we worked it for a mutual benefit. Others have taken their issues to their advisor, which I find slightly unprofessional as there IS a chain of command that needs to be followed in a work place. I'm not sure how your internship is setup, just throwing in my $.02

Also, I frequently see that many internships don't offer credible experience and use students as cheap labor. It's important that if you feel you're not receiving the proper experience or work, you address it and either find a new internship, or see if there is a solution with your supervisor.