the average workday

Now that you know how I ended up here and how the company got to where it is let's take a look at what the day to day looks like.

Everyone comes in somewhere between 9 and 9:30 and boots up their machines, after that we gather around the SCRUM board for, you've guessed it, the SCRUM meeting. For those of you that don't know what SCRUM is I'll give you a quick briefing, first off it is not an acronym as you might think it's something to do with rugby (not really my area). Basically, it is a project management technique widely used in software development, it is an agile and iterative process. Projects are broken down into sprints and sprints into smaller tasks that typically take about a day to accomplish. The point of the meeting is to quickly assess the work that has been done the previous day, the work that has to be done on the day and add any new tasks that might have been created.

After the scrum meeting there is the "weather forecast", on the board next to each developer's name the two columns "today" and "yesterday" in which we place images of either the sun, rain, thunder, etc. ... this way we have an overview of how everyone is feeling about the current workload and helps to make adjustments on the division of tasks if necessary.

Now that you are a SCRUM master we can get into the meat and potatoes of the daily routine of a software developer, what comes next might surprise you, the rest of the day is spent, wait for it, programming!

I'm not going to bore you with the technical details (for now) so let's talk about how the workspace is organised. In a typical "start-up" fashion we work in an open-space, a couple of very large wooden desks all stuck together with around 8 computers. Here you can see the programmers in their natural habitat typing away furiously at their keyboards all day. Sometimes we use an app called Festify which creates a music playlist to which everyone can add their tracks and up or down vote tracks of others, other times it's pretty quiet and most of us wear headphones and listening to our own music.

Lunch is around midday, we have an hour and during this time some have heated fussball matches while others play some MMORPG's or any other game.

The afternoon is spent programming (what a surprise) and the day comes to an end at around 6PM.

That's it for this post next we'll talk a bit more in detail about the tools used.