The last month has been pretty busy for me - I’ve been on two teams, one of which has been launching a big project, and there’s been a lot to do. A few weeks ago I tried to capture my day (in bullet point form!) to give people an idea of what being a Senior Developer is like, how much code I write, what my work/life balance is and so on. Spoiler: I don’t do 2 hours of wellness yoga before my morning kombucha smoothie in order to keep looking this good.

  • Wake up around 7.30, shower etc.
  • Drink a cup of tea while doing Duolingo Welsh. I lost my 250-day streak last summer and have been trying to pick it up again recently.
  • Remember to stick the dishwasher on before leaving the house.
  • Play Two Dots on the train into work. I have stopped feeling guilty about playing mindless phone games on the commute (over say, reading an improving novel), it’s sometimes necessary to zone out and lock your brain into simple pattern matching.
  • Swing by Pret as usual for breakfast (coffee + croissant - again, I refuse to feel guilty about the aforementioned lack of nutritious vitamin-infused granola in my diet).
  • Arrive at my desk around 9.15am. Eat my croissant while checking emails and Slack. I also merge a couple of now-approved pull requests from the previous day. Most of my team get in earlier than I do, which is handy for staggering the timing of reviews.
  • Stand-up for team 1. I tell the team about the status of my in progress tickets, what I’m blocked on, the usual.
  • Stand-up for team 2. We agree that a newly ‘suggested’ piece of work is not well defined enough for us to start working on, which is just as well as we don’t have time to work on it anyway.
  • Spend 10 mins straight after Stand-up 2 writing up why that piece of work could cause confusion for the user (and indeed us).
  • Spend most of the morning rewriting two pages for our developer manual, which together list all the complex stages of the project we’re working on. What this really means is that I’m trying to resolve the 7 unknowns I’ve marked out, like finding where a particular script lives, what emails we’re meant to send when, why step A needs to be done before step B - or can step B actually be done at any time? Most of the steps are straightforward, but it’s important to do them in the right order, and because we don’t carry out those steps very often they are currently poorly understood by the team. But not for long!
  • While doing this I also: help a colleague sort out their AWS config; listen in remotely to a presentation where my old team is talking about what they’ve done since I left them (i.e. a great job); keep an eye on Slack in case the stuff I merged earlier has broken anything.
  • Lunch at 1.15. I walk down the road to a salad chain place and back, and eat a massive salad at my desk. Eating lunch at my desk is not ideal, but I want to finish writing while the subject’s fresh in my mind.
  • After lunch, a planned story writing session for team 2 has been cancelled as we have written all our stories. Well done us! Team 1’s retrospective has also been reschuled to next week. A potentially meeting-filled afternoon has now suddenly cleared, which gives me more time for writing.
  • Take a break from writing around 2.30 to review some pull requests, including checking out the branch locally and running tests. While they run I check Twitter and become entranced by a gif of a dog jumping and falling over.
  • Collar our Head of Software Engineering as he randomly walks past, to ask him a quick question about a line management task.
  • Some 500 errors appear on our Slack alerts. I briefly investigate the logs to make sure it’s the same problem our 2nd line rota were dealing with earlier, as they are both currently doing something else. It is indeed the same problem.
  • Finally finish writing and jot down the two outstanding unknowns on post-its to ask people about later. Our developer manual is in github just like everything else, so I squash my commits and push up the branch, change the title of my WIP pull request to ‘ready’, and ask for a review on our team’s dedicated Slack review channel.
  • Make a well-earned cup of tea around 4pm, and chat with a team member about career advice stuff.
  • Try and track down a script (one of the unknowns on my post-its - we know we ran it last year but didn’t note down the name of it). I can’t find the script so decide to write one myself. It works! It’s just a data export and won’t be run in production, so I don’t bother with unit tests for now, but put up another pull request for review. (Two days later I will find the original script, which has tests, and close my PR. I don’t think it was wasted time to have written my own version, as I got to better understand a bit of our code I was less familiar with.)
  • Go straight from work to Lewisham for an hour’s swim with my masters club (8pm-9pm). It’s not a long session, only around 2km, but it’s a medley set that I find quite tough. Pick up some chips for dinner on the way home.
  • While eating said chips I chat to my partner about my day and check the internet. Happily my partner has unloaded the dishwasher for me so I don’t have to do it. Around 10.30 I feed the cat and fold up some clean washing, by which time I am fully ready for my bed, but not before I’ve watched an extremely daft video trailer for the Bangface Weekender.

So there we are. Back in the Livejournal days we’d call these posts ‘yoghurt updates’ (as in, ‘and then I ate a yoghurt’) but I loved them, seeing the little details of what all my friends did every day.