Jacob Wisniewski

Hi, I'm Jacob and I'm a graduate software developer at REA. I graduated in 2020 with a degree in computer science from Monash University. My day in the life at REA has changed over the year, mostly due to whatever team I was currently on rotation with.

9:00am

In my current team, which is called REA Experience, all our meetings are usually scheduled before lunch. The first daily meeting starts at 9:50am, so I have 50 minutes to do a variety of things. On this day, I refilled my drink bottle, asked a team member I was working with about their availability for the day (they were busy till after lunch) and reviewed the task I was picking up for the day. At 9:50am I jump onto the team Zoom and my team have 10 minutes with no agenda, it's more of a social meeting and we transition directly to our stand-up at 10am (today a bit later because we were celebrating a team member recent wedding!).

10:00am

Our stand-ups are usually concise, with the host of the stand-up being chosen every day at random by a bot in our team slack channel. I was the host for the day, and I ran my team through our Kaban board (a board consisted of three columns: TO-DO, IN-PROGRESS and DONE). I go through all the tasks on the board and enquire my team members for any updates on what they had done the previous day and what they'll be working on for the day. Any potential issues or things to focus on will be brought up now as well. Stand-up usually takes us around 10-15 minutes, todays was a quick though.

10:10am

Although we may have finished our stand-up and most other teams would be leaving the Zoom to attend to their own work, my team doesn't leave the Zoom just yet. We have a special meeting that we call "After Party”. Not many teams really do this, but some might extend stand-up to cover the topics that we dedicate this time to in this meeting. It's an opportunity to bring up anything you wanted to discuss with the entire team. Usually, it's about something you're working on, or maybe asking for suggestions for some sort of technical challenge. "After Party" can range with its length, but it’s usually around 30 minutes.

10:45am

We finished after party at 10:45am, and usually by 11am I've finished all my daily meetings, so this day was to a good start. Now personally I like taking my lunch at 12pm (some of my team takes it at 1pm). That leaves me with a 1-hour gap of time between daily meetings and lunch. There are some bi-weekly meetings that occur like retro, refinement and planning in this time slot and every Friday this gap is filled with a knowledge sharing session that my team uses to discuss a new tool or maybe a new way of doing things in our codebases. But I don't have anything scheduled today, so I can get started on my fresh new task.

My team is new and we're working on two completely new codebases, meaning most of the tasks that I'm doing are what we call "feature work". Namely, adding some sort of functionality to our product. The task I was working on, is a property timeline (a timeline of when a property was built or sold). This task had two major components to it, some changes I needed to do to the backend server and then a change to the frontend. For every single task we complete, we also need to complete an "analysis". An "analysis" is a document which outlines all the changes we anticipate and any information that we need to collect prior to beginning the actual work. For the timeline task I had already completed my analysis the prior day, so today I could dedicate all my time to actual implementing it. REA has a strong pairing culture, meaning I wasn't working on this task by myself (although in some situations this can vary depending on the availability of team members), in this situation my team member wasn't available until after lunch.

Before I got stuck into the task, I grabbed a small snack (cheese in this case) and topped up my water bottle. Then started one of the major components of the timeline, which was the backend. Work on the task went smoothly until lunch.

12:00pm

Lunch time! Since I'm working from home, I take the opportunity to stretch my legs and go for a walk around my neighbourhood. It's easy to being sedentary when working at home, so I make sure I go for a walk at least once a day.

After getting home I eat lunch (usually have something meal prepped, today it was beef goulash, rice and veggies).

1:00pm

Finished up lunch and jumped back on my computer. My pair partner was available now, so I jumped into a Zoom call with them.  Because I had worked on the task a bit already, I shared my screen and explained the changes that I already had made. They gave some feedback and potential improvements, some of which we implemented. This is why pairing is so valuable, because you can work closely with talented developers who have a wealth of knowledge and experience.

 

We both had the rest of our days completely clear, so we continued working on the backend together until 3pm where we both took a small break to look at something other than a computer screen, and in their case check on their kids.

3:00pm

After our break, I uploaded all the changes I had made to the cloud. Before the break, I had been making all the changes physically, while they watched and commented on what I should be doing. We swapped our roles, and now I watched them type and I added on my thoughts on what they should be adding or changing.

4:30pm

It was nearing the end of the day, and my pair and I were starting to feel ready to finish up for the day. We pushed our changes to the cloud and headed off Zoom.

5:00pm

The day was finished, and it was time to close the laptop to disconnect from the screen for a bit.