6:00 am
I wake up to the sound of my alarms! Yes, I have that many (morning people in the making). I drag myself to the kitchen immediately afterwards for a cup of coffee to bring me in the present. I’ll then greet my dog (Joy) and take him for a walk. Then I’ll sit down and check my messages and soon try to complete a chapter from my current book.
7:15 am
I’ll grab some breakfast, put on my headphones and head to the gym.
9:15 am
Arriving at my desk, I take a look at my personal to-do list to see what’s on the docket for today. I like to review a pull request or two before starting my work. We “bucket” all our peers instead of assigning it to an individual as this peer review system helps me substantially to understand what’s going into the code and what other features I can include which I’m not actively working on.
9:45 am
I take stand-up with people I’m currently working on or delegating tasks to, prepare my JIRA board for upcoming feature requests or bug fixes, check my and my team’s ticket statuses. We discuss the progress of major workstreams of the project, have any technical issues addressed or discussions which are quite useful in work from home times. We take a second to check on each other: Are we on track for release? If not when? etc.
I really appreciate this time because it gives me an opportunity to voice any concerns candidly.
10.30 am
I’ll begin with coding now. Soon after I’ll take a coffee break and sometimes I take a minute to post a workstation with a coffee mug kinda picture on Instagram, after all we just got certified as the “Great Place to Work® Institute (India)”.
Today I am working on our GO app web-view. It’s an amazing app where you can directly use your bank accounts to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. I love that it’s making the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies more accessible and seamless. After the demo, the engineers start testing it out and piping messages into the frontend channel. Not only is it fun, but it provides valuable feedback for the team which help us and our app improve significantly.
1.30 pm
Lunchtime! Though I enjoy being home in this pandemic I really miss my whole crew at lunch. We used to order Biryani, Thai curry, sandwiches, and whatnot, and with a round of tasting and serving food, we’ll share some laughter and have fun.
2.15 pm
I’m back at my workstation. I’ll quickly check for upcoming scheduled meetings, messages or PRs to review and plan my time. There’s a sprint retrospective meeting scheduled at 4 pm. A retrospective meeting gives us a chance to reflect on our last sprint. We look at our individual as well as the squad’s JIRA board. This includes things that went well (the thorough review of the technical spec paved a clear path!) and things we could improve on (decisions midway through the sprint could have been documented better). There’s a clear sense from everybody of wanting the team to work better together, so we plan on actionable things moving forward.
5.00 pm
We have our Feature requests from the Business team, they will be assigned to the team roughly and we have our sprint grooming. Post that, all developers will come back to another sprint planning meeting with their estimates and this is how we have our Sprint ready! Our JIRA boards will be updated accordingly.
6.00 pm
Now is the time for our Sync up meeting for FE (Frontend developers). We discuss all our technical challenges, approaches, questions and updates here. We all work in different squads at times so it’s important to come together to understand how we’re moving forward as a collective team.
7.00 pm
I’ve finished up my pull request, complete with linking documents, JIRA tickets, and instructions for manual testing. I find that the more time I take to fill out these descriptions, the faster my changes are approved. In five months, when I will be looking at my lines of code, it will be handy for me to do a git blame and find out “why this line was added”.
7.30 pm
I check up on my team if they need any help or their status on the tasks today. Sometimes, I will schedule calls with them for a better understanding of their workflows if they ask for it.
10.30 pm
And it’s about time I’ll wind up my day after a dinner table get-together with family and spending some time with my dog. I prefer to sleep while reading or sometimes scrolling through my phone. And that’s a wrap.
