On Tuesday, the company held it's Sprint Review for Sprint 4.5.

While awaiting details for my next project to work on, I was invited to observe a primary project one of my peers works on weekly: a generic YAML parser. YAML, in very short, is a data serialization language, which is used to translate an object into a format for future retrieval, and they're generally used in the setup of configuration files. A YAML parser retrieves, reads, and writes to .yaml files within the file system.

While I may not work as closely with his project as another one I've been assigned, it brings up many core challenges that I'll face as a software developer that I hope to acquire ground on. Very frequently, the programs we design need access to other processes within the system, or it needs access to the filesystem to pull and alter files. Python supports many kinds of functionality that allow for influencing the filesystem and operating system processes with packages such as pathlib and os.

These techniques have always appeared advanced to me, and I felt shy accepting a task like this at first because I never studied much beyond Python's native IO methods. I've since been assigned another task that will require me to implement a method returning the contents of a directory as a list, programming my script to utilize Unix commands.