Nathan joined GoodNotes 8 months ago as one of our software engineers, after being referred by a friend. While he started out working on backend projects, he’s now migrated to the Data Platform team, where he works on a cross-functional team to build our internal analytics platform.
Here’s what he gets up to during a typical day in GoodNotes’ Hong Kong office.
9:50am
I arrive between 9:50am to 10am in the morning. The first thing I do is check updates in my email, Quip, Notion and Slack.
10am
I’m currently working on the Data Platform team, and every day at 10am we have a standup meeting. Our team is made up of colleagues that specialize in machine learning, data, and software engineering. I started out mostly doing backend engineering, but now on this team, I’m also doing data engineering.
10:15am
After our standup, I’ll join the crowd that’s inevitably formed at the coffee bar. Like most other people in the Hong Kong office, every morning I make a coffee to practice latte art.
I can’t taste the difference in different coffee… but I can see it.
It’s nice to communicate with people from other teams, so I’ll usually stay to chat depending on how many people are there too. When there’s no one else making coffee, I drink pretty fast and I’ll return to my desk.
There is rarely no one else there:
10:30am
This is the time I’ll spend grading take home assignments from engineering candidates, which they receive after an initial screening call.
Otherwise, I’ll go straight to coding.
I use IntelliJ IDEA when coding in Kotlin, PyCharm for Python, and Visual Code for everything else.
12:40pm
At a certain point midday, I’ll suddenly feel like the air is silent, and I’ll look up to see that everyone’s gone. That’s when I know it’s lunch.
1:30pm
As if I hadn’t already spent enough time at the coffee bar, we usually have coffee tastings after lunch, where James and Patrick make hand drip coffees for us to sample.
This is when I pretend to know how different coffee from different beans tastes.
1:45pm
Then it’s back to work.
I get to work with many others too outside of the Data Platform team. Since I’m responsible for ingesting data into the data platform, I get the data from strategic parties on different teams. So for example, if I need data from Jira, then I will find Rammy, our QA; if I need data from Zendesk, then I will find Denny, one of our customer support agents.
4pm
On Fridays, GoodKitchen (our in-house catering!) usually has some kind of dessert in the afternoon, so I’ll head over to the dining hall.
6pm
When I need some suggestions on technical things, you’ll find me floating around nearby coworkers’ desks around this time. It’s helpful to also understand what others are working on and how I can learn from them.
And that’s a wrap! Can you see yourself spending a day at work like this?
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