Navigating the Gray: A Day in the Life of a Software Developer
Hey everyone! I’m Tim and I’m one of the software developers in the Silicon Next Valley Talent (“SVNT”) June 2020 Cohort. Prior to launching my career at SAP, I studied Computer Science at Arizona State University and finished my education at Make School’s Product College. Throughout my time in school, I juggled a few web development positions — all while attending and organizing a hackathon (Sun Hacks)! In my free time, I typically enjoy sitting at a coffee shop while curating new playlists. Fast forward to today: I am now working on SAP.iO’s Spotlight team and I can’t think of a better team to have joined for my first rotation.
As part of Navigating the Next, I’m here to conclude our segment in “Navigating the Gray,” where we provide some insight into a day in our lives as developers, UX designers, and data scientists.
When it comes to a day in the life as an associate developer at SAP.iO, I feel like there’s always something that keeps things fresh. I never feel as though I’m in a monotonous cycle of repeating the same work or tasks. To the contrary, each day is a new hurdle to overcome with something to learn. That being said, I’m often asked what my work-life balance is like, or what my usual daily routine looks like as someone who began their new journey remotely.
The Daily Routine
I like to break my day into two parts. The beginning of my day is usually comprised of various meetings which tend to come to an end by noon. The remainder of the day is spent working on my assigned tasks and reaching out to my team if I have any questions or want to spark a quick discussion.
My workday usually starts at 9am with occasional morning calls at 7am with the rest of the Spotlight team in Germany. It’s usually around this time that I catch up on any of my emails, monitor the Zenhub board, and check any ongoing issues/pull requests on Github.
By the time I finish this up, my team does a 30-minute coffee chat at 10am where we talk about anything but work (or so we try). Because of the pandemic, I was quite worried about entering and onboarding to a new team virtually. I wasn’t sure if I’d have the same connections or interactions with my coworkers had offices been open. However, these morning chats help me stay engaged with my team all while growing our camaraderie.
The rest of day I spend on whatever assigned tasks I may have. Most of my tasks so far have been a combination of both frontend and backend web development. As someone in their first rotation, they often consist of fixing the functionality and styling of the pre-existing web application, writing unit tests, and creating new react components.
Whenever I find myself stuck on a certain topic or problem, I reach out to members of my team who’ve never hesitated to hop on a call to help explain or pair-program with me. If there’s downtime, my team encourages me to dive deeper into areas I’m not familiar with to learn more about them. I really am fortunate to have a team that fosters growth and personal development.
Throughout my work week, I have typical meetings like weekly updates, 1-on-1s with my managers, sprint meetings, and other various team meetings. The meetings don’t bog my routine down and are spaced out quite nicely, allowing me to block out certain parts of my day for development without having to hop on and off calls.
Lastly, a weekly meeting that I enjoy partaking in is our Friday Wind Downs. These help keep everyone up to date with all of the revolving parts of our teams. The wind downs are also pretty enjoyable because we’re able to celebrate the end of the week with each other and watch members give fun presentations that we call “mock o’ clock” and play virtual games together (Among Us, Code Names, etc.).
Growing Pains
Now that I’m approaching the end of my rotation, there have definitely been a lot of memorable experiences and lessons that I’ve learned. I think one of the struggles that I’ve had to discover for myself firsthand was knowing how to effectively ask for help. Something that I’m currently working on is knowing how to find “balance.”
I needed to learn how to effectively ask for help while not relying on it too much as well — in other words, knowing how to ask insightful questions rather than burden someone else by my not being keen on details. I think that through my experiences in the first few months, I got to see for myself what a good question was as opposed to a bad question. And, when I say bad questions, I mean questions that have already been answered on our Wiki or documentation, or something I could have found out had I read more carefully.
For example, when getting a large error message in my terminal, I sometimes jumped straight to googling the error message without really reading or thinking of the root of the problem. It turned out that the error I had was due to the version of my local environment, not anything related to my files.
The rule of thumb that I have taken away is that if you feel like you’ve spent too much time on a problem after rereading the problem — it’s probably best to reach out to a team member to discuss your logic or thought process and see if you are on the right track. Spending too much time pulling your hair out is only a detriment when a team member can quickly unblock you.
Throughout my four months so far, I can happily say that I couldn’t have asked for a better experience in my time at SAP. Every day feels like a new opportunity to tackle a new problem and learn new things — you’ll never be bored.
My best advice for those of you entering your first job is to always look for areas to grow in and to take advantage of every opportunity — but remember to take care of yourself and be aware of burnout.
I am very fortunate to be part of the SVNT community as well as my Spotlight team as I kickstart my career.
If you’re interested in hearing how my co-workers & friends are navigating the gray, check out our video and our other recent posts!
