Wow!

WOW!

You know, we're going to change the face of blogging and advertising when we release this thing next week. Everyone here is totally confident of that, and incredibly excited about the future. But WOW, is it hard.

I wanted to do a "typical day in the life of" thing, but honestly today's days are not typical. They are as far from typical as you could possibly get, and everyone on the dev team is pining for the point that days do return to their normal typical selves.

5am. Wake up. Kinda. The more work we do, the more goals we aim for, the harder it seems to wake up.

5:30am. Wake up a second time. The first one doesn't usually take. I stumble out of bed, practically fall down the stairs, stagger into the kitchen and hit the magic button that makes coffee. A notebook has usually managed to attach itself to me by this point, so I offload it onto the kitchen counter and make it get my mail.

6:00am. Ok, now the waking up thing is just about starting to take. There's a least one cup of coffee inside me by now, the dogs have been taken outside and duly emptied, I've fed my disgusting nicotine habit, replied to the emails that desperately need attention, and made notes on those that I need to follow up on later. Time to hit the lists now.

6:45am. I use a process called GTD (Getting Things Done) to organize my life into handy buckets of actions I need to take. By about 6:45 I've gone through them all, processed all my open loops, noted new actions against projects in the various areas of my life and sent out a few emails as well for those actions that really aren't mine. Time to go shower.

7:15am More emails, check the code, check the calendar.

9:00am Arrive at the office and that's when the fun starts. I've usually got just enough time to set up my computer (all the dev team use laptops) before someone's stood behind me wanting something.

9:30am Dev team standup. It's called a standup because the idea is to keep the meeting short. By making everyone stand up, there's less tendency to waste time and waffle. These days we're all so tired the standup is actually a sit down. Everyone shares what they did the day before, what they are going to do and what stands in their way. It's a great way to get everyone up to speed with how the workload is spread across the team.

10:00am Back at my desk, more emails, more questions, and various impromptyu meetings usually ensue in between fighting to write some code. Yes, I still write code, but in many areas I'm dwarfed in skillset by the people around me.

11:30am Lunch, and often a code review. These happen 2 or 3 times a week. The dev team huddle together in the conference room and go over really scary parts of the application to explain what they did, why they did it, and teach each other what they need to know for their own work.

12:30pm. Back at the desk. Usually the afternoons slow down in terms of formal meetings, but I can pretty much guarantee that my entire afternoon will be split between writing code, assessing status reports from the team, talking to individuals with concerns and issues, answering to Ted, weighing up new design considerations, checking test deployments, writing emails and managing my own action lists. Throughout it all a little application called iGTD runs in the background ready for me to capture literally anything that might be thrown my way.

6:00pm Home time. I try to leave on time each day. I have a daughter at home, two dogs, two cats and a girlfriend. But the work day is far from over.

7:15pm Arrive home. pet the dogs, hug the girlfriend, argue with the teenager, and then sit down to eat.

8:00pm Back to work. I usually start the evening on the couch with the notebook. I go through all the open items I captured that day and start sorting them. What needs to be an action? What's a project that I need to start thinking about? What can I file? What I can throw away? I go through my project lists again asking, like any good GTD'er does, what's the next possible action to move this forward.

9:00pm Back to code. By now I've usually got a grip on what happened that day, and what needs to happen the next day. I have code to write though, so I'll move to the office about now to log into campfire (the dev team's chat system) meet the team and start coding. We're now in the evening afternoon as I like to call it. There are a lot less interruptions than there are when I'm at the office, but often team members will pick this time to have quality one on one time with me. So, I talk with whoever needs me, sometimes solving tricky code issues, other times talking through workload, the company focus, the future and so on. After each of these it's back to writing code.

midnight to 2am. Time to sleep. I usually can't sleep by now even though I'm exhausted. There's just so much going on, so many things to think about. I grab my iPod, head up to bed and usually fall asleep watching a re-run of something mindless (current faves are 24, and Stargate).

And that's a typical day these days, but far from typical as I confused you all by saying at the start.

But, I wouldn't have it any other way. It's an incredible feeling knowing that what you are pushing so hard to achieve is going to have such a huge positive impact on so many people.

Posted by Peter Wright at 04:55 PM in Development | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)