Location: In Office💡
We are a hybrid company, and I am usually in the office 3 or 4 days per week. I tend to like going in on Mondays as it starts the week off nicely for me.
As a team, our ‘in-office’ day is currently Thursday. My last day in the office varies, depending on if I have software architecture or product discussions, or if I am pairing with another engineer and writing code in person.
Arrival time - 08:45
The first ~45 minutes of my week usually consist of catching up on information such as messages and meeting invites from last week. Then I think of my plan for the week and what I want myself and the team to accomplish. It’s important to have an idea of this - even if it changes midway through the week.
09:30
Meeting with a fellow engineer on another team, Adam Hoar, about how to tackle a new reporting requirement in their team, including integration with some new tools recently published by our team. We discussed ownership, data-as-product thinking, and how to integrate with our tooling. We also discuss some high-level thoughts about how to design data models for analytical consumption, and how that differs from operational data design.
10:00
Standup! Triaging new issues that came in over the weekend, general update on what we’re planning to do today and this week as well as discussing any blockers. We found that a couple of tickets we’d triaged and refined last week weren’t clear enough, based on discussions with our users, so decided to clarify those before putting them on the backlog.
10:30
Make a coffee and then communicate some information to the team about individual goal-setting for the upcoming half.
At Liberis, every engineer works with their Engineering Manager to set individual goals for each half.
10:45
Review a PR from another team! A small change to update to new package versions, ensuring we’re keeping our services secure and up to date.
11:00
I met with a team member one-on-one. We discussed using the training budget for some advanced training on GCP. We are in the process of migrating or rebuilding many of our older services, data pipelines, and new services to GCP, so having advanced knowledge of its capabilities and limitations is extremely useful.
We get £1000 per year for Learning & Development at Liberis and are encouraged to use it!
12:00
Lunch! Waka near the office does good Peruvian Japanese fusion food 🍣
13:00
Incident writeup from a minor incident last week, where we had degraded performance on our legacy analytics stack. This includes a root cause analysis as well as short-term and longer-term mitigation suggestions. I started writing this last week, so needed just under an hour to finish this off and publish it. The learning for this was that one of our servers comes under significant load during spikes due to PowerBI refreshes - so we both increased server capacity and tweaked the schedules to even out the load so we don’t have the same in future.
13:45
Interrupt engineer handover - where we hand over on-call responsibilities in our team from our current engineer to the next engineer in the rota.
14:00
Job specification review with our VP of Engineering, in preparation for a hire in the Data Platform Team. We are hiring for a senior software engineer - data platform. if you have read this far and are interested, please visit our careers page!
14:30
Project scoping with our risk team. We’re onboarding them to Liberis’ new analytics stack, built around BigQuery and Looker, so we discuss with them how to approach working with them, and what migration problems to tackle first with them. The Data Platform team will use the outcome of this meeting to work out what items to refine and execute on so that the risk team can successfully self-serve analytical data on our new platform.
Risk is one of the most prominent users at Liberis of analytical data, both for forecasting our risk assumptions and how that affects the business, as well as looking back at nearly 20 years of data to infer insights - so their requirements are complex.
15:30
State of Production. Each platform team has the opportunity to discuss what new changes to the platform have been released and are upcoming. Engineering as a whole will then discuss recent incidents and the learnings that result from post-mortems.
16:30
Popped some music on and then wrote some unit tests on a side project (an on-call pay calculator) that I’m working on. It’s the lowest priority of all my work at the moment, so I put the occasional 30-60 mins in whenever I am not too busy. It’s great because it’s Test driven, the scope is very clear, and it’s a nice way for me to keep my C# skills sharp.
17:00
Head home from the office. Another benefit of being in on a Monday is that I usually get a seat on the central line on the way back home…
