A Day in the Life of a Boclips Engineer.
9.30 Stand up. Our daily ritual.
This is short, no more than 5 minutes and as the name suggests, we actually stand up in a circle. The structure we follow is; User stories in flight, events, helps and interestings. This short meeting every day is a ritual that brings us together and opens up the communication channels between Product and Engineering. It ends with a synchronised group clap! We aim for perfect unity.
9.40 We do the pair dance!
You can dance if you like but really this is just when the team decides who is pairing and who is solo-ing. We pair program a lot, not only, but about 80% of the time. It’s great for learning and sharing context. We try to rotate every day. You can opt to stick or twist on a user story. Got story burn out, and need to change it up? No problem. Tired of pairing? Then it’s time to solo. Either way, you get to see all aspects of the product, the tech stack and different user stories.
9.45 Coffee or Tea break. The first of several.
10.00–12.30 Morning Pairing Session
Some examples here of real user stories the team are working on.
Search box autocomplete. Helping our users find good content is top of our list of priorities. Autocomplete is a way of helping users make better queries to the search engine. It’s a very enjoyable story to implement: we use some interesting data structures so that suggestions appear very fast.
Analysing our usage data, with Beth, our Product Manager. We look at the % of users who played videos, the engagement on the videos and also how many users go to the second page of search results. It’s always good to pair with Product Managers as it means better shared understanding and collaboration.
Lunch. We take this seriously.
Every Friday is team lunch day courtesy of Deliveroo. On other days we chat, go to the gym, go running by the river. Maybe go to the climbing wall. Board/word games are popular too. Every Tuesday we’ll do a Lunch ‘n Learn and watch a video together related to tech, product or education.
2.00–5.00 Afternoon Pairing Session
Improving search results using synonyms. We explore how we could improve these results. For example, when a user types in “second world war”, they should also see videos with “WW2” in the title.
Researching how to identify a language spoken in a video. We look into the data, and try to work out if we can tell the language by the title or clip description. This turns out to be unreliable, so we explore 3rd party services that look at the actual media file to do the detection. The solution is a hybrid between analysing metadata and the video file.
5.00–6.00 Bits and Bobs.
What else makes up the week?
- Ideation. Basically brainstorming. Maybe new features. We might run a Crazy Eights session. (Coming up with 8 design ideas in 8 minutes)
- Retro. A group reflection on the week that includes happy, sad and neutral faces attributed to the week’s events on the whiteboard. Why? Action the sad faces so they next time belong to the happy column. A recent example was — CSS is messy. Action — Matt, one of our Engineers researched and presented the different strategies of writing scalable CSS. Now it belongs to the happy column.
- Pre-IPM. (Iteration Planning Meeting). One of the engineers goes through the backlog with the product team and sees if user stories are suitable and ready to be pointed. Why? We get early feedback. We make sure that IPM is smooth and time is not wasted. Not ready for pointing? We’ll reduce the scale, split the story basically do a scaled back version.
- IPM. This involves product and engineering. We assess complexity of the story in more detail. We give the story a point value. Why? It’s a shared understanding, we are all on the same page.
- Design Critiques. A chance for the whole team to comment and feedback on design flows and prototypes with our Odete, our UX Designer. Here she is!
- Speedback Sessions. They are very much like speed dating…except that instead of flirting, we give each other feedback. This way, each of us can find out about things we could continue or start doing to get better at our jobs. We do it because we care about each other, and we stick to the ASK principle: each piece of feedback is Actionable, Specific and delivered in a Kind way.
The good news is we’re hiring! We are regularly welcoming humble and well-rounded engineers to the team. Get in touch if you would like this to be your day.
