A career in software development can open a lot of exciting doors, allowing you to support key business initiatives, create new software features and functionalities and help to keep everything technical running effectively.
My day normally starts between 8 and 9 with a good cup of coffee, at which point I'll check emails and messages and go through my job list and look at what needs tackling first. After that, I'll crack on with my tickets for the week.
If my team are kicking off a project that day and we'll have a kickoff meeting where we go through the scope, discuss our build strategy and write the Kanban boards so everybody can keep track of what needs doing. If a project is wrapping up, we'll be busy testing and prepping for our internal demo, which is the final stage before the client gets to see it.
I like to go running at lunchtime a few times a week, so the first part of lunch is often spent on that. After that, I'll grab a shower and a bite to eat, then get back to work.
I find that most productive hours are in the afternoon, so I'll try and get the challenging stuff done here if I can organise things that way.
Most of my day can be split up into chunks of an hour or two unless there's something big going on which needs more attention. I'll look over tickets, add features or even put in fixes and keep our project tickets up-to-date so the PM team and the clients know where everything's up to.
Usually, by 5:30-6 pm, I'm winding things down, unless there's something urgent that can't wait, in which case we stick around until it's done. Fortunately, things are usually planned out so that that kind of evening doesn't happen very often!
We tend to cook a lot and meal-plan at home, so there's usually a big tub of leftovers to reheat. If there's nothing pre-made in the fridge, I'll usually make my own sandwiches.
Besides Stack Overflow? (Only half-joking) My toolkit is fairly standard. I use VSCode as my IDE, XCode and Android Studio for native development, Paw for API testing, Gitkraken for managing our version control and some Adobe Creative Cloud apps for when images & graphics need manipulating.
We essentially recreated Dropbox/Google Drive for one of our clients as part of their existing web app recently. It was a small team and a tight timeframe, but it was a lot of fun to put together. The constraints almost made it feel like a coding jam!
I like the thought process behind designing software systems. There are a hundred ways to make an app, and nobody will ever agree which is best, but designing apps that work well and feel nice is an art form that I'm keen to master!
Self-direction, good problem-solving and a logical mindset are key in my opinion. I would also urge everybody who stares at a screen all day to find the time to get outside at least once per day. Even if it's cold and rainy, it'll do wonders for your mental health and productivity!
If you would like to find out more about working as a software developer, check out our Instagram page for a behind-the-scenes insight into life at Scriptbaker, or visit our careers page.