7.00 AM
Alarm goes off – time to hop out of bed, shower, make myself a nice big cup of coffee, and get ready for work :-)
8.00 AM
Time to begin my commute – I’ll hop in the car, put on some of my favourite tunes and sing along for my 30 minute drive.
8.30 AM
Arrive at work – I’ll greet my other team members who have arrived before me.
Some of my team are very early starters (7am), and some are much later than me (10am). The advantage of software engineering is that it's not something that has to happen at specific times. It doesn't matter what time code is written - what matters is that it works. BAE Systems understands this, and supports flexible working hours :-)
8.35 AM
Typically I sit down at my computer just after 8:30, with a nice hot cup of coffee. I check my emails, and I’ll check if any of my team members have sent me a code and/or document review to action. Personally, I prefer to do reviews first thing in the morning.
After I’m settled in, I’ll get a start on working on whatever I was working on the day before - I like to think I write some of my best code first thing in the morning.
9.45 AM
Time for our daily stand-up -
In order to facilitate agile software development, we use scrum to manage our project - of which daily “stand-ups” are a fundamental part. A “stand-up” is a short, time-boxed, daily meeting, where each team-member can talk about any progress they’ve made on their current activity. This helps us get on top of issues early, and keeps everyone on the same page.
I’ll talk about what I worked on yesterday, what I’m planning on getting accomplished today, and most importantly - if I’m experiencing any dependencies or blockers. If I’m starting to wind down on my current activity, I’ll discuss with the team and our “scrum master” what activity is best I pick up next.
10.00 AM
After the daily stand-up, there are usually corridor technical conversations, some more socialisation, sometimes more meetings, but most of the time - more coding.
I consider my time between 10 am and 1pm to be the most productive of the day. Pure mental flow state, where I can be either head-down writing code, or in deep thought working on a system design.
1.00 PM
Time for lunch!
Lunch times over here are pretty varied – some of the guys gather in the kitchen to play board games, some people go to the onsite cafeteria, some others even change into their active wear and go for a jog around the site - whereas I normally sit around with my team to eat, and talk about just about everything from food/cooking to the plausibility of robots taking over the world.
1.30 PM
Today, I’ve been asked to come along to the weekly a User Experience (UX) meeting that our UX Representative is holding with our customers. These meetings consist of our UX Expert, some of our end-users, and a select few software engineers. Often, these meetings are casual in nature (i.e., attendees listen, absorb and give feedback of designs), while other times we hold workshops that encourage active participation in activities such as collaborative sketching, paper prototyping, or trial runs of the software.
As a predominately back-end engineer, I don’t need to engage in user experience as regularly as our front-end engineers. However, I still find the experience incredibly helpful in understanding the intended design of our system – and I enjoy the interaction with our stakeholders and users.
2.00 PM
The last part of my day is normally pretty productive. Between 2 pm and 4:50 pm I’ll normally go back in a state of intense mental flow, where I’ll be deep in the weeds of coding, debugging, code reviewing, designing, or communicating with my team about design or architectural decisions.
4.50 PM
Time to head off home! I’ll normally drive home the exact same way I got to work – singing along and enjoying the drive.
6.00 PM
Time to hit the gym - as a software engineer, it is part of my job to be at a computer for extended periods of time, so I find going to a gym class to be a good outlet. I find keeping fit is also beneficial to a stronger mentality, and increased levels of focus.
7.00 PM
I’ll normally make dinner around 7, and then do whatever errands I need to do around the house – other times, I’ll break up the week by visiting family or friends for dinner instead.
10.00 PM
Around 10 I try and begin to wind down, perhaps watch a movie with my partner or play some video games.
12.00 AM
Time to get a good night’s sleep – a well-rested, sharp mind is crucial for a software engineer :-)