Stephanie McDonald

6.00 AM 

I ambitiously set my alarm early and make the call about whether I sleep in or get up to go for a run. It’s not raining and it’s still just bright enough outside so I decide to start my day with a 4km.

6.30 AM 

Back from my run and now time get ready, pack my lunch and make my breakfast all as quickly as possible. Not because I have to leave particularly soon, finishing my run at 6:30 is ample time but I know that it is the sign of a good day if I’m able to take some time before I head off to work to sit and enjoy my breakfast and coffee without constantly watching the clock.

7.35 AM 

I’m out the door pretty much every day between 7:30-7:40 and on my way to the train station.

8.05 AM 

I make it into the office and spend a few minutes organising myself, grabbing a hot tea or filling up my drink bottle and catching up with my colleagues.

8.15 AM 

Now I’m ready to start my day, which normally always begins with emails and checking slack messages. I often have already checked them on the train to prepare myself for any issues that have arisen over night. Unless anything is urgent I like to wait until I’m in the office to reply to ensure my reply isn’t limited based on my inability to type a proper reply while standing on a packed and moving train. Now in the office, I begin to investigate the concerns raised by marketing and some of our Chile team members relating to tracking on our site soloautos.mx.

9.00 AM 

I manage to find the cause of the concerns and see it’s only a tiny little code fix. I quickly build my branch in staging before our daily stand-up and team coffee run.

9.30 AM 

Now well caffeinated and caught up on what the rest of the team is doing (including any binge-worthy tv shows discovered the night before), I open my diary to have a look at the to-do list I wrote myself the day before. I normally like to do this as soon as I arrive in the office but today the tracking concerns took priority. I reassess whether the bugfix I still need to test and deploy will prevent me from finishing any of my other tasks on the list and decide to be optimistic and aim to complete the list plus this little bugfix. I add it to my list and start testing.

10.30 AM 

Bugfix deployed and with all those concerned about tracking data now at ease, I spend the next 30 minutes chasing up tasks I have had to put on pause for the past week as urgent tasks have taken priority.  This mostly involves chatting to the different teams involve and seeing where everything is at and then updating everyone involved.

11.00 AM 

I have a meeting to discuss a new epic/project for our team. We have started discussions previously on what needs to be done but this meeting is about starting to outline the details and architecture of the task and how it will fit with our current architecture relating to our datalake.

12.00 PM 

Lunch time! Today I had hoped I would be able to get outside for a walk/run with a colleague but the sudden downpour of rain has led to that being cancelled. Instead, I grab my lunch and sit down with the team. I sneak off a little early to start preparing for my class this week of CS in Schools, a program I volunteer with that involves me going into a school one morning a week to teach year 7s how to code.

1.00 PM 

I get to work testing a new feature for our tracking that I had wanted to implement some time ago and am excited to finally have the time to get it tested. Hopefully it will be ready to deploy tomorrow morning.

2.00 PM 

I catch up with one of our android developers to start testing a change to our app tracking. These sessions have been my favourite and most feared sessions. I know so little about app development and that used to always make me anxious before we tested together, however after working with the app teams on a couple of projects I’ve really begun to enjoy the opportunity to learn and work closely with another team and a different set of skills and experience.

3.00 PM 

Coffee break! I duck downstairs to our coffee machine with a couple of colleagues on my team and we are all glad to find it recently re-filled with coffee beans, in fact there is even a bottle of soy milk in the fridge.

3.15 PM 

With the help of coffee to push me through that afternoon slug, I open my dairy again to check where I am at with my to-do list, pleasantly I see I have made good progress. Just one task left on the list. Unfortunately it’s the most challenging on the list, thankfully I’ve kept it vague and just written “make progress on pyspark job.” It’s been an introductory task for me on a new data engineering topic and has proved quite a challenge. However, I’ve learnt that although these tasks can seem scary, they always end up my favourite because I always gain so much out of them. I get to work on the task, looking through my notes about where I was last stuck and try to make some headway.  After reviewing the notes I see I have been stuck on this part for some time and decide instead of trying yet again, I will formulate some questions and ask my colleague for some guidance on how to work through the issue.

4.30 PM 

I managed to make some progress on the task and my colleagues were able to point out one part that I was misunderstanding. I summarised what I was misunderstanding and the progress I had made on the task as well as what I needed to get to work on tomorrow in my notes. I then reflected on the day and wrote down a few more notes for myself about what I had done/learnt and what I needed to note for future reference and started to jot down a to-do list for myself for tomorrow.

4.45 PM 

Home time! With my to-do list for today all ticked off and my to-do list for tomorrow all written it’s time to call it a day.