The week is coming to an end, and I have a few more mental notes to make about training in general. For the first two, see the previous post.

1. Bring your own coffee mug and water bottle.Not only is it nice to have a little bit of home with you on the road (my favorite coffee mug has special meaning to me), but it beats the tinystyrofoam cups they provided at our training. Ignoring the environmental impacts of using a lot of toxic cups throughout the week, it is a pain to keep getting up to refill my coffee. Also, as one of my odd observations, the more coffee I drink in these cups, the faster it gets cold, so the faster I have to drink it, etc.

2. Get there early on the first day. As programmers, we might not be the most social kids on the playground. What I’ve found is there are either predefined cliques (e.g. coworkers) or defacto cliques (e.g. those sitting immediately next to you. After the first day, you know those people, your machine is setup just the way you like it, so you’re likely to sit there every day that week. Not just you though, everyone will most likely do the same. So if you arrive late, or even on time as I did, the first day, you’ll most likely be stuck in the back. You might not be able to read the text in the presentations or see over the heads and monitors of those in front of you.

3. Export your settings and tools to the web. This is a great trick for more than even training. I was lucky enough that my post before coming here was about my new IDE colors and I included my settings file. I was able to bring it down and now my IDE here looks exactly like the one at home. If I would have exported a few more settings, all the keystrokes would be the same as well. Beyond just the settings, any tools you might use can come in handy. This also helps if you leave your company, or get a new PC or log in somewhere else. Having those things in a central place is nice. I’ve even seen people store their settings files on Google Code so they can keep a history of them, or just for a central storage location.

4. Bring a storage device. Some of the labs, PDF’s etc are nice to have. They usually give you this as a download, but being able to take what you’ve worked on in class, back to the hotel room is pretty handy.

I should probably get started on the morning lab. Hopefully this weekend, or next week I can provide a quick review of my class.