The case of the missing packages

On my first job, at day 1, I was given a desktop computer that is not what I used during the the job interview, I might have been given a book as well as a reference. Things I had to do manually when I sat on my chair:

• Install JDK
• Install VSS (Visual Source Safe)
• Install JBuilder - Side Note: I was not aware of the term “IDE” before, I thought you’d be programming stuff using Notepad haha.
• Install a DB client

I remember then that we had to hit the ground running due to a tight deadline, so I had to commit to tasks right away. One of my first tasks is to create this web page that shows a list of business locations. For a newbie who did not know what she’s doing, there’s this secret that probably made me survive my first 2-3 weeks: COPY-PASTE!!! My mentor showed me this other page on his computer, it looked exactly the same as the page I was about to produce. And having downloaded all the files of the project into my computer, all I had to do was to copy-paste all the files related to that page, change their file names, attributes and others, then run it on my machine.

However I hit a major blocker - when I tried to “run” it, there were a lot of errors that told me about some missing stuff. Looking back, I probably wasn’t able to compile the whole thing at all since my machine is not recognizing all these imports that I copied. I immediately learned that I have to copy a couple of jar files from a remote drive into my local lib folder. Those missing libraries made my thing work! Just reminiscing that feeling is so satisfying.

...Especially nowadays when everything is automated with just a piece of command.