Where do new ideas come from? How do features like Mistplay Status become a reality? And how have things changed from the time when Mistplay was just a team of 4 people? We interviewed Dylan, one of our lead software engineers, to answer these questions and more.
How do you usually start off your day?
“I normally wake up, take a shower, and then hop on the call for our daily meeting with the rest of the engineering team. Everybody shares what they did yesterday, what they plan on doing today, and if they’re facing any blockers. Usually, I have at least one or two meetings in the morning, and I can get some programming done in between if I’m lucky.”
What kind of meetings? Are they the same every day?
“It’s totally different every day. I teach people how to use the features we built, interview candidates for our engineering team, and review design documents. After that’s finished, I take a break for lunch — I usually like to cook something. Then, I have a long block of uninterrupted coding time for the rest of the day.”
Is there a reason why you schedule your days like that?
“I find that big chunks of uninterrupted time are best for programming, so I try and put all my meetings in the morning. During my afternoon coding time, I do my best to work on programming and nothing else. If there’s a task that I’m invested in or that’s challenging, it’s really easy to just focus on that. I’ll look down at my keyboard at like 2 p.m., and then before I know it, it’s 7. Those are good days. After work, I’ll usually cook dinner and watch YouTube, unless we have social events like board games night or a happy hour.”
Has working from home changed anything?
“The workflow is exactly the same. Not being surrounded by people is kind of a double edged sword — on one hand, it’s easier to focus since people aren’t coming up to talk to me. On the other hand, having people working around you can be a motivational force as well, and that sense of community has definitely lessened now that we’re all working remotely. When we go back to the office, it’ll be interesting to see what the social dynamic is like — we were a team of 25 people when we left, and now we’ve grown to over 40.”
Speaking of growth, how have things changed from when you first started off as a developer at Mistplay?
“Everything has changed. When I started, there were only four people at the company; we were two engineers, and now we’re getting close to 10. We went from a very free-form atmosphere to a more structured, planned workflow. Now, every two weeks our engineering team puts some time aside to reflect on what went well and what went badly, with the goal of continuous improvement.”
Beyond reflecting on the previous two weeks together, does the engineering team do a lot of collaborative work?
“Not really. It’s hard to have two developers working efficiently on the same task, or even on two related tasks. Occasionally, we’ll do “pair programming,” where two people work on the same code together. This can be useful for training purposes, or if we’re doing something incredibly important like quickly fixing a bug. But for the most part, we have a divide-and-conquer approach, so every new feature gets split up into components which are each tackled by a different developer.”
On that note, how do you come up with new features?
“We have constant streams of ideas from everywhere. Engineers on our team, suggestions from users…our CEO Henri is a huge source of ideas too. All of these ideas are reviewed by our product managers, who get to decide what would be best to build in the time we have. Once in a while, Mistplay holds a competition where the whole team tries to brainstorm new things. Our last competition led to the creation of Mistplay Status, as well as another incredible idea that our users will be hearing more about soon.”
And on that mysterious note, we’ll sign off…
We hope you enjoyed this glimpse behind the scenes. Curious about another aspect of Mistplay? Let us know in the comments or send us an email!
