A Day in the Life of a Tech Lead at Motorway

Morning

Before I am a Tech Lead at Motorway, I am a father of two wonderful girls, so my day actually begins by waking them up at 7am, making breakfast, getting them ready, and taking them to school. Recently my 9 year old learned how to make tapioca wraps and she's actually been taking care of breakfast. That's delegation, everyone! And even though it's ten times harder to clean her mess than actually making the breakfast, eventually she'll be ready to assume that task completely.

I get to work around 9:30am, which is home or our London office if I'm feeling like a change of scenery, and the first thing is always coffee. As the caffeine starts to flow, I will catch up on Slack and see if there's any urgent issues or conversations happening that are waiting, or could benefit from my input. I'll take a look at my schedule for the day and get ready for standup at 10am.

As a Tech Lead during standup, I'm not only concerned in reporting about my own work, but I am also watching everyone else's tickets, trying to identify potential blockers or issues. Sometimes seemingly simple tickets can be tricky or cause butterfly effects that are not so easy to spot, especially on a microservices architecture, so it's important to have knowledge about and consider the whole platform all the time.

At 10:15am standup has ended and the real day begins. I have a personal rule of not doing any work before I review every single PR assigned to me for code review. This is extremely important as their work is blocked until my review is done. It doesn't matter how long that takes, I will review every single one until I am done.

Once there are no more PRs to review, I allow myself to work on my own tickets. Unless of course, there are meetings… and there are always meetings!

Interviews, technical scoping, briefing sessions, one-to-ones, planning… it's all part of the job. Engineers love to say how much they hate meetings but at Motorway we try to make sure every meeting is necessary, the agenda is defined on the invite, and that everyone knows why they're there.

Afternoon

To make sure I get a few uninterrupted hours of focused work every day, I have my calendar blocked at certain times. This avoids context switching and allows me to focus completely on my tickets. Most days this time is in the afternoon, so after lunch I sit down, put on some music, and get to code.

At Motorway I work in the squad responsible for some of our most important internal tools. We take care of our internal Dashboard that our many agents in Brighton and Durban use all day every day to manage our user’s vehicle information, making sure they are ready to go on sale. We also build and maintain microservices that integrate with external systems, for customer service, accounting, CRM and others.

Twice a week I take an afternoon break at 3pm to pick up my daughters at school. I don't sneak out, this is a recurring event on my calendar and my squad is well aware of it. It's amazing to be able to work at a company that allows me to do that!

Once I'm back and the girls are fed, I'll continue to work on my tickets or help other devs with their work. But before I call it a day, I'll do my best to review any PRs that were assigned to me during the day. As I said at the beginning, it's very important to unblock people and allow them to take their work to the finish line as fast and safely as possible.

Evening

As the work is done, I now get to focus on my family and myself. Some evenings I'll take my girls to piano lessons, or help them with homework. If I am at the office, then there's a high probability of going to the pub for a pint or two. And from there, I'll go home and play some games or watch some shows to relax. Currently I'm playing Elden Ring and probably will be for months to come (I’m a huge Souls fan), and watching Severance (weird and brilliant, I am loving it).

All in all, being a Tech Lead has been the most exciting position I've been in my career. There's a healthy mix of writing code, mentoring, architecting, planning and scoping. Every night I'll go to bed with a good sense of accomplishment while also looking forward to what's to come.