A Day in the Life of a Senior Web Developer in Motorway
Here’s what it looks like
Morning
I usually start working slightly after 9am. It’s a half an hour before my squad’s morning catchup. This gives me time to read through the latest tweets posted on the random channel or — what I like the most — it’s my morning code review time.
At Motorway, we have flexible starting hours. For people working in the UK tech team, we typically start anytime between 9am-10am, and finish accordingly between 5pm-6pm.
Quite often, my first messages on Slack are sent at 9am sharp, even though I’m not always active at that time — it’s a result of me using scheduled messages. It’s a good practice I developed so I don’t bother my colleagues with messages late in the evening and a way for me to not forget to mention my findings.
The day I am going through in this article started exactly that way — I found a bug on our website the day before, and I scheduled a report message for this morning. It happened to be an unreported visual regression for which the team created a backlog ticket. Drive to Win (one of Motorway’s key values) and work-life balance nailed 😊
Building products used by more than a million people each month brings a sense of pride and fulfilment, but being a FE Developer makes me directly responsible for what users see — or what’s worst — what they cannot see. It’s why often I like to click through our products at random times and places (oh man, never take 3G/4G for granted) to make sure I know how they perform outside the fibre broadband fairytale.
The first ceremony I attend daily is a standup. My standup starts at 9:40am and takes 15 minutes. It’s a time for me and my squad to walk the board (it’s one of the techniques of running standup we tried, and we like it!), to update ourselves about any blockers and to check on ourselves in the form of the energy level question 🙂 This morning I was 7.5/10 — feeling good and ready to crack on!
After standup, it’s usually time for me to finish my breakfast (or start it 😅) and prepare myself a coffee. It was George’s (a FE Developer from my squad) first day after his holiday, so before I headed to the kitchen, I messaged him to briefly discuss the task he was assigned on the latest sprint planning when he was away.
Coffee ready, time to continue doing code reviews!
Focus time
Every day, between 11am — 1pm I have my focus time. It’s a period in my calendar I have full ownership and control over — so no meetings or interviews unless I agree to them.
I usually try to use that time to do my coding, but I still had several code reviews to go through that day so I focused on finishing them.
In Motorway, we require each PR to be checked by two reviewers. This rule helps us ship fewer bugs, and encourages people to share the knowledge as not that seldom you’ll want your PR to be checked by a person from outside of your squad.
Before the lunch break, I completed checking a PR for our system for managing vehicles sales, then I did a quick review of Button PR for The Highway Code (our Design System) and I re-reviewed a change request for our Dealer’s platform for purchasing vehicles. Later, to give my brain a break, I checked and replied to a few messages and threads (pro tip — Slack doesn’t need to be a real-time messaging tool). Lastly, I jumped on a Huddle with Matt, a Senior UI Developer from my squad, to talk about a Design System story he was working on.
It’s lunch time — time to update my status on Slack 🥪
I worked from home that day (I work four days a week from home) so I headed to the kitchen to prepare some fresh food.
After lunch
Afternoons usually have different paces every day. It’s a time when I usually have most of my organised meetings — sprint plannings, story refinements or retros. It’s also the time when I do most of my interviews (if you apply for FE roles, now you know the time you may talk with me) and ad-hoc meetings via Huddle.
If you asked me to create a cloud with the words I think describe my typical day in Motorway, the word which would probably stand out the most would be collaboration. From Code Reviews to Pair Programming, collaboration is one from the things which make Motorway such a great place to work.
This afternoon I had two scheduled meetings — a story refinement and a one-to-one with Cristina, one of our trainee engineers (Junior developer as of last week 🥳) I am mentoring, and then it was time for me to push my story forward.
Every company wants to hire the best talents, the full-grown-mature-developers. Oftentimes though the talent they are all looking for is yet raw and callow. This is why in Motorway we hire trainee developers to help them grow and to create a new generation of engineers. Every trainee is paired up with an experienced developer who acts as their mentor and manager.
Between the meetings, I jumped on a call with Olly, our Designer, to discuss an error state for the new screen he designed for the page we were working on.
To make sure I have enough time to do my work, apart from the morning focus time, I also have my afternoon slot, starting around 4pm.
I finished my day by working on a story to set up a unit testing environment in our Design System repository. And then it was time to logout() ✈️
Being a Senior Developer in Motorway is a great mix of coding, architecting, leading, planning, recruiting and helping others do their best work. Every day challenges me in a different way (we are transforming the industry here!) and I couldn't be happier with where I work 😊
About the author
I’m Szymon, a Web and Design System Developer at Motorway. Since I joined 3 years ago, I have been helping to build the fastest-growing used car marketplace in the UK.
If you would like to learn more about being a FE developer in Motorway, connect with me on LinkedIn, where you can drop me a DM, and make sure you follow us on Medium to be notified about new stories we publish.
PS, We are hiring! 🚕
