A WFH Monday as a StashAway Software Developer

Getting started ☕️

Typically, I start my day at around 9:00/9.30: opening up Slack… But wait a second! I start my day a little before, preparing a good cup of coffee. Great, now I can get back to my laptop and continue to check Slack. Firstly, I go through the channels relevant to me to stay updated with the different projects and discussions. If there is anything with high priority for the day, I note that down. Today, that’s not the case so I move on to the next task.

Over the weekend, one of our backend services had reported an unexpected behavior. It was neither urgent nor critical so we decided to wait and investigate on Monday. The warning message sent by our error reporting system includes only limited information. To see the full picture, I prefer to check the logs of the application. We aggregate all the logs of the various systems using the ELK stack, so after getting some insights from our Kibana dashboard and discussing with the team, we agreed on the corrective steps. We document the required actions and send the details to our DevOps team. They proceed with that and all is well!

Temporal Setup 🚀

After this small hiccup, I pick up my task from where I left off last Friday. Just recently, we started using this cool technology called temporal. It helps us to orchestrate our many microservices (we are using the Go SDK). The process of picking up new technology always involves a lot of:

• checking the documentation
• reading through support channels
• facing issues here and there

Though the process can be frustrating, I still enjoy most of it. It is always a good chance to learn new patterns and concepts. Furthermore, I am sure that this technology will greatly help in developing our workflows and making them more resilient.

The morning passes by rather quickly and it is already time for lunch! I spend slightly more than an hour cooking and having my meal. Then, of course, I make another cup of coffee before heading back to work.

Meetings 🧑🏻‍💻

Every Monday at 2 pm, we have a company-wide meeting, during which we receive updates from the offices in different countries and the departments. Today we only had updates from our Malaysia office and from the Marketing team, so the meeting is very brief.

Later in the afternoon, I will have a few more meetings with my squad. The first one is a preliminary sprint planning. The following meeting is on a second design iteration on one of our feature projects, which we have already completed the first proof of concept. Now that we have some insights and understood the problem better, we think that the current solution may not be ideal. Hence, we decided to review it and attempt to simplify the design. Before the first meeting, I have a short time-window, not enough to pick up the task I was doing in the morning. Therefore, I review the details for the second meeting. Our squad has just three developers, so the planning is quite fast. However, we will need to spend a little more time on the redesign part. Nonetheless, we are able to come up with a new design that we are happy with.

Later in the afternoon, there is another short meeting: a daily stand-up, at tribe level. Each developer shares her/his focus of the day. It is also a good moment to share blockers or difficulties if any.

Wrapping up 🌅

After all these meetings, it’s time for a break. I get a couple of snacks and have a few minutes off before proceeding with my unfinished tasks of the day. I review a merge request for one of the projects that our squad “owns”. Before I call it a day, I wrap up today’s work, the rest is for tomorrow.

This is one of my typical days as a Software Engineer at StashAway. Today I had (way) more meetings than usual and spent some time researching on temporal. As a result, less time actually coding today. That also depends on the company’s focus at the moment, there are periods when I spend most of the day developing features and periods during which I have more time to focus on the technology part.

Its been almost a year and a half since I started working as a Backend Engineer in StashAway. This is my first job after university. Days pass by very quickly and work for sure does not get boring. There are plenty of opportunities to learn and it is exciting to see how quickly our work has an impact!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post and I hope it was insightful! If you would like to know more about StashAway, please feel free to reach out to us! And by the way, we’re hiring!