A day in the life of a Frontend Developer at Vodafone UK

My name is Alessandro Giordo.
I’m Italian, 33, and started working in London 6 years ago.
I started as a self-learner coming from a Languages background and Degree but always was a geek, tinkering with computers from a very young age.
I started learning from FreeCodeCamp and CodeCademy, then switched to Udemy and other courses like Coursera.

I didn’t know I wanted to do JavaScript and Frontend when I started, but now I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.

When I was contacted by Vodafone UK, I was working as the main Developer in a creative agency.
The work there was good, very different from my previous experiences in Full stack and AI, but the way we worked really blocked me from delivering high-quality code and design to the customers.

I joined as Mid-weight Frontend Developer and I currently work within the checkout team, known as Kraken.

Every day, we have standup where we all highlight our activities on the day before, what we will be doing today and what’s blocking us.

This is a standard activity in all agile teams, but we enforce this as a start of the day so that we all know what everyone is doing and can avoid doing the same, or perhaps work with the other person in pairs to deliver faster.
We then start picking up stories from the business. The PO (Project Owner) will have written it following BDD (Business Driven Development), so from the user point of view.
Each story is pointed during the sprint planning and refinement session every two weeks.

If I don’t have a story for myself, I always go around the juniors to ask if they need any help or guidance or just to check how they are doing.
Our team is very social and collaborative. We avoid being isolated, except when it’s really needed (story is hard or you need to focus on a particular part of the code).

Around 4pm we sometimes do a show and tell where everyone that has something to show is allowed a time-boxed section of the meeting to do so.
Every 6 sprints we have a new PI (Program Increment, you can read more about SAFE agile here https://www.scaledagileframework.com/program-increment/), which allows us to plan the next 6 sprints in advance and write the general main goals and risks together.
This is a very useful process and I was really stoked to learn about it and do it with the team.

Every other Wednesday we do a sprint demo, where stakeholders and Product owners can see our progress and ask us questions or point out things that should be changed to align with the business needs.
What I really liked is that for two weeks, we have an IP (Innovation Planning) sprint (at the end of the PI), which allows us to explore an idea which could bring potential benefit to the business.

For example, last time we worked on PWAs and Accessibility, but each team can do something different and present it at the end.

If you want to step out of your comfort zone and join a team of highly skilled people, do visit Vodafone Careers page for our vacancies:
https://careers.vodafone.co.uk/