My day as Software Engineer in D-Nitro Team @ The KPN
Welcome to my humble blog! Here I would like to share my experience and day-to-day activities as a member of the D-Nitro team.
Intro on my team:
The team facilitates value enablement by providing developer productivity services to the KPN organization. This accelerates the value of the delivery of the team's applications. Our goal is to accelerate the software development lifecycle for application teams by providing a paved road of practices, ways of working, and tools. We are a team of 7 individuals with a product owner, a scrum master, three Senior software engineers, and two Software engineer trainees. I am a part of this wonderful team as a Software engineer trainee since April 2022.
These are our main tech stacks: Django, Vue JS, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Artifactory, Docker, etc. We use BitBucket to store our source code or Projects. We use JIRA to keep track of the progress of our tickets. Slack is the main medium of communication.
We work from the office on Mondays and Thursdays and the rest of the days we work from home. I usually go to the office around 9:45. Some people arrive much earlier, but then they leave earlier in the day. Our hours are flexible, as long as we get the work done. We usually greet each other with ‘Good Morning’ before 9:00 on Slack and we have a daily ‘Standup’ meeting for 30 mins at 10:00.
In the daily ‘Standup’ meeting we discuss about the status of the tickets using the JIRA Kanban board and we also talk about ‘operations’. ‘Operations’, or ‘ops’ for short, it is the term we use to help engineers from other divisions of KPN who have queries while using D-Nitro tools. We have a separate JIRA board for operations. Sometimes during the meeting, we also discuss on developer productivity, and more interesting ones are meetings where we discuss a product issue and come up with a solution for how to address it.
We have a 4-weekly meeting called ‘TechBase review & roadmap’ from 10:00 to 12:00 on Thursday. It is the place where all the tech-base teams meet and discuss new updates in their projects, or share some valuable insights that all the teams should be aware of.
We usually go to lunch at around 12:00. We have a nice cafeteria on the ground floor of our building. Lunch-time conversations are fun and we talk a lot about various topics like food, travel, technology, etc.
We have a ‘Refinement’ meeting once or twice a month on Thursdays. During this meeting, we add/update new JIRA tickets to the ready status & estimate the difficulty level of the ticket and add more information about the tickets.
We have a bi-weekly ‘Alignment’ meeting on Mondays where we discuss the order of priorities on our applications which we as a team should focus on in the coming weeks.
We have a bi-weekly ‘RETRO’ meeting on Monday afternoon where we discuss things like ‘what should we spend more/less time on’ or ‘what we must have/ nice to have/ concerns or fear’ etc. The aim of this meeting is to basically increase our team’s productivity.
I am also a part of The Pink Panther group which is a girls-only group where we meet regularly and organize events. The goal of this group is to organize Safety for women and Brave space.
Every Monday from 16:00–17:00 we have a fun team bonding event called Jennie’s hour. The event was named after one of the ex-employee of our team who initiated this idea. During this hour we usually play UNO and have a lot of fun. The day ends on a happy note and we wish each other ‘Talk to you tomorrow, have a nice evening!’.
On a typical week, I spend about 4 to 7 hours on meetings. The rest of the time I work on activities related to my tickets. These activities could be understanding the program flow, adding new features, bug fixes, testing, documenting, etc. Most of the tickets that I work on are related to the ‘backend’ and a few of them are related to the ‘frontend’.
Since joining the team, I had the chance to work on projects like ‘Console’ & ‘Katka’. The ‘Console’ project provides a unified UI and API that covers a growing set of infra/tooling-related tools and applications. ‘Katka’ is an orchestration tool that allows teams in IT Companies to have a centralized way of managing and monitoring the whole development process from the moment a ticket is created up to when the outcome is available in production.
We share the Pull Requests on a private channel in slack and I get some valuable feedback. The discussions on PRs are a very good learning resource.
Overall, I am happy to be a part of a team whose members are intelligent, ambitious, and encouraging.
I would also encourage you to check the blogs of my colleagues: Mattias, Anita, Alex, Jevon, and Lais.
Thank you :)
