Day in the life of a Senior Software Engineer in Flights

By Daniel Kentfield

Click Travel is shaping the future of business travel with our award-winning corporate travel management and booking platform. Our goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of business travel for everyone involved. But for all the developers in Click, it is more like an advanced technology company. We are all in a department called “ProdEng” — Product and Engineering Team. We build our own cloud-based platform and make API connections with lots of 3rd party suppliers which are related to Flights, Hotels, Trains and other business travel bookings.

The flights team is (as you probably guessed) responsible for building and managing Click’s flight services. We mainly use AWS node lambda functions, some EC2’s running Java and a whole variety of frontend frameworks. We are responsible for the whole customer experience of flights from the backend supplier fed lambda functions up to the front end the user sees when they search for a flight.

So, what’s it like to be a senior software engineer in the Flights team? Let me walk you through a typical day for me:

Before work

I normally start off nice and early by walking my dog and then head to the gym around 6.30am for about 1 hour. I do this every morning as it helps improve my mood and focus.

8am — 9am

As I work remotely I don’t have to commute, which means I start a bit earlier and finish a bit earlier too. This is probably the biggest benefit for me as I hate commuting for hours a day and it has been linked to poor health implications in a number of studies.

Lately I have been spending about an hour or so in the morning reviewing some of our Java services as I am not super used to the language. I spend the majority of my time in node.js microservices, however, occasionally we have to dig into the Java too.

I then go over the emails from the evening before to check if anything urgent has come in.

9am — 9.30am

I recently added a handy integration that sends me a slack message when a Jira reminder is fired. I do this to keep track of support tickets we have open with external suppliers and I was finding the reminder emails were becoming buried in Gmail. We spend most of our time in slack and I thought some more of the department might find this useful, so I wrote and shared a quick blog about it.

As a department, we like to foster a culture of continuous learning and one way we like to disseminate this information is via internal blog posts as well as lightning talks and design sessions. I have personally found this really useful and learned a lot from my peers.

9.30am — 10.30am

As a team we like to get at least one other person to review our pull requests (PR). This has been super useful for maintaining a really clean unified style and makes our code much more maintainable. I review a couple of open PR’s and merge them once I am happy.

I move on to trying to test a bug fix I made yesterday in one of our lambda’s which connects to an external supplier. I find that their test service is returning unusual errors and after checking the logs some more I realise it has been going on for a few days, so I send them a quick email to see if they can help.

As I am blocked in that issue I quickly get some test data together to test another bug fix I made the day before and update the jira.

10.30am — 11am

Every morning at 10.30 the flights team have a zoom call to track how close we are to completing the tasks we set out at the beginning of the week. We also use this time to highlight any urgent issues that have come up that need fixing.

11am — 12pm

I only have about an hour until my next meeting so I do some more research into step functions to prepare me for another meeting later in the day.

12pm — 1pm

Every two weeks my line manager and I have an informal zoom call to review my performance. We have settled on a formula of recording my achievements and listing actions I can make towards goals I set our earlier in the year.

1pm — 2pm

We have a high-level design meeting today to discuss using a step function for a new project. Our team hasn’t implemented a step function in this way before so we want to understand a bit more about how to best architect the state machine for our use case.

2pm — 3pm — Lunch

I take some lunch and walk my dog because she has been growling at me for the last half hour. I work 100% remotely which I love because it means I save hours commuting every day and can walk my dog at lunch!

3pm — 5pm

I finally get around to adding some code in one of the node lambda’s to handle some strange errors we have been receiving from one of our suppliers. This code will stop customers bookings from failing prematurely by retrying a request if it fails. This is one of my favourite parts of my day and after getting myself slightly confused with some recursion I raise another pull request.

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About the Author

I am Daniel Kentfield, Senior Engineer at Click Travel in the flight’s team. I have been at Click for about 6 months and work remotely from Essex. I am currently learning Russian (and can hold a decent conversation), love playing the guitar and I’m a bit of an obsessive book worm.