Hi, I'm Lucian and I've been a software engineer at Movio for just over a year. In this blog, I'd like to share what I get up to on a typically work day.
8.30 AM - I arrive at work and make myself some breakfast and a coffee in our office kitchen. We have a fruit bowl delivered on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I quickly grab some of our free office fruit--best to get in quick as it’s really popular! I usually use this early part of my day to catch up on emails, update my Jira tickets and review any pull requests assigned to me for approval. I also have a read of any other tech news that may be of interest.
As a global company with offices in six locations I have coworkers in multiple timezones, so I check to see if anything that has come up overnight from the overseas teams. It’s vital that we include the whole team everyday, so ensuring we are on top of any of our colleagues requests or issues is paramount.
9.30 AM - Have a catch up with the squad via our daily stand-up meeting to go over what we've done the previous day and what we've got planned for the rest of the day. These stand-ups include not just devs but representatives from all parts of the company that has an interest in what we're doing, including operations, testing, marketing and, of course, the product owner. After standup, the devs usually stick around if there's anything development related that we need to discuss further.
10.00 AM - Get stuck into some coding! If I'm working on a larger piece of work, I'll just be starting where I left off from the previous day. If not I can pick up a ticket from our Jira board. If I'm feeling in need of morning tea a few of the guys normally do a bakery run around this time so a caramel slice or custard bun could be on offer!
Lately, I’ve been writing microservices that interact with our main application. Our microservices are all written in Scala which has been a very pleasant language to write these in so far. These services are containerised using dockerand deployed using puppet.
Developers are involved in the whole process, from writing the service to deploying it onto our servers. We get to use a great range of tools this way, and it's very useful for troubleshooting to have knowledge over the entire stack. Starting new projects is always fun as you have a clean slate and some freedom to do what you want with it.
This type of autonomy is why I love working at Movio. We are trusted to work, learn and even make mistakes while we strive to make our product better every day. Our CTO Kalman Bekesi calls this our ‘fail safe’ environment in his blog ‘6 Attributes of a top tech team’.
12.00 PM - We have many choices for lunch up the road, but I usually can't go past Thai or kebabs! Everything is a stone's throw away and really reasonably priced. Auckland is well known for its great quality Asian food options. If you're into keeping fit you may want to join the Movio Run Club and go out for a run over lunch, or if you need to chill you could go and join our weekly Yoga class. After lunch, there are normally some heated foosball doubles games. We have a foosball table in the office, and some of us take our matches very seriously. We even have a league and annual champion. After winning at foosball (hopefully), I like to relax for the rest of my break.
1.00 PM - Back to work, but not before I've made coffee number two! Another part of my work day that I like is that at Movio we encourage peer programming, so I like to pair up with a coworker in the afternoon to tackle a problem together. It's been a great way to both learn from those more experienced or know that I truly understand a topic by teaching it to someone else.
If it's a Friday........
3.00 PM - Each week we all gather for a dev forum to celebrate our accomplishments and talk about technical developments and learnings within the Movio products that we have been working on. There’s always a great supportive atmosphere with plenty of jokes and banter.
4.00 PM - Friday Drinks! We like to celebrate the end of each week with some socializing with the team. We put on some music, grab some drinks and snacks and catch up with everyone.
5:00 - 6.00 PM - Time to head home, but not before some more foosball games to unwind after the day.
If Movio sounds like your kind of place check out our latests vacancies.
