A day in the life of

After asking on twitter and getting this tweet and the inspiration of this post I decided to join the ranks of the “A day in the life”.

7:30 - 9:30am Wake Up

Yes that is not a mistake, my wake up time varies a lot. If I have gone to sleep early the night before, if I have stayed up late watching random YouTube videos I will get up early or later. If Pepper (my awesome dog) decides to get up early then I have to get u- early or some times she lets me sleep in. My morning routine is probably really bad an not the best way to start the day. I rarely get breakfast or if I do it’s unhealthy. I always try to get at least a fresh coffee and watch some episodes of Frasier, King of Queens or Everybody loves Raymond (it’s the only thing on tv at that time).

9:30 - 10:30am Time to travel

Depending on the weather or if I’m running late I will either walk to work which is a nice easy 45min walk or a even more comfortable 15min bus ride. On the way to work my preferred method of disconnecting from the world around me is podcasts. I listen to mix of different podcasts ranging from tech to general knowledge I plan to make a post about the ones I listen too.

10:00 - 10:45am Arrive at work

My work is very flexible and my team are also very flexible with work hours. We have a team standup at 10:45am everyday that we try and have. Before standup I try and catch up on any slack messages I had overnight (we have a lot of US teams and customers) I also try and get though my emails I never read them all.

10:45am Standup

We follow some very relaxed form of agile development on our project which means we have a daily standup. We try and keep things very quick usually a few words on what we worked on the day before and what we are working on today. Sometimes we get lost in a tangent or a rand about some feature. I’m very lucky to have a team that put up with my sarcasm and humour my crappy jokes during standup.

11:00-12:30 Try to work/meetings

Usually after standup I’ll try and get into some coding or depending on the day I will have some planning or review meetings. On Mondays we review the defects that have been raised in the last 7 days to ensure that we have prioritise and assigned a developer to the bug. Other days there could be a meeting to plan out the design of a new feature or task we need to address.

For my coding time I will be working on whatever new feature we are building out or fixing bugs. As the team lead I try to assign out work based on people’s abilities I also like to take on the technical tasks and major defects. This allows the rest of the team focus on delivering the big ticket features. I also spend time looking into our shared JavaScript libraries and tool this could be adding a new UI component or reviewing a pull request from a different team.

12:30 - 1:30pm Lunch time

My team usually break for lunch at the same time everyday. I’m on a health kick (which is not going successfully) and batch cook my lunch at the stars of the week. This means I rarely go out for lunch with the team. I do probably one of the most unhealthy lunch time practices and eat my lunch at my desk while watching BBC news and YouTube videos, sometimes tech related mostly random stuff. If I’m under pressure to release a bug/feature I’ll do some coding while stuffing my face. On some rare occasions we will go out for lunch to a sit down meal and “one” beer.

1:30-6:00pm Back to work

Depending on the day this could be headphones on blasting my Spotify discover weekly and bashing the keyboard or a mix of meetings and training with the team. I try to take regular breaks from coding to clear my head either grabbing a coffee or playing a game of pool. This doesn’t happen as much as it should but we have a open plan office so breaks can range from turning around to distract my team with random talk or getting into a heated nerf dart battle. Open plan offices are awesome for collaboration but can be a killer for productivity and a easy place to get a nerf dart in the eye.

6:00-7:00pm Time to end the day

Depending on the day I can finish up at different times, I work with teams across the globe and we sometimes have late meetings to work with people in the states. Sometimes we like end the day off with a few beers in the office kitchen while playing a game of killer pool. Depending on the night goes we could head onto a local pup for some more beers. Usually I head home to have dinner with the pup and the wife.

7:00 - 8:00pm Dinner time

Time to get home and enjoy dinner with the family this is a time to relax and forget about that bug I couldn’t fix all day. Chill out and forget about tech.

8:00pm-onwards

This is the closing off for my day I usually chill watching random YouTube videos endlessly scrolling through Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. If I’m feeling that I really want to continue my bad habits I’ll pull out my laptop and start working again usually joined with a beer or other delicious beverage. If I have any side projects on the go I’ll try and get some work done on them too. I don’t have many hobbies so always end up back at coding or learning more JavaScript at night time. Jokes aside about working at night this is not something expected of me by work but more a bad habit I have had ever since I started in tech. I’m a bit of a workaholic I actually enjoy it so find it hard at times to see the bad side of this.

1:00-3:00am Bed time

This is far too late to be going to sleep but I’m I’m a night owl and proud.

Hopefully this is a interesting insight into the day in the life of a software engineer.