The full stack report w.23

“Whats a week like?”. Not as easy to answer as it is to ask. I thought it would be nice to keep a journal during the days and see where it leads. Here’s an attempt for the “a day in a developers life — remotely in sweden” youtube video — in writing.

Monday

Many meetings with good new candidates. We want to grow the tech team with more developers within the next 6 months. So this means we need to assess the technical level of a lot of candidates. I like meeting new people and asking about them. But at a high pace it’s a big exhausting to me.

The youngest kid stays at home today with the mom of the household which means a bit more noise in the background than usual. Something that’s been very common during the pandemic.

Have listened to rich dudes from Silicon Valley reflect on their time starting Twitch today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vG-Sxk-c2k

Weekly all team meeting went well. No big things. Just that our announcement about our recent investment got some attention. Not a big deal. The tech team is trying our best to communicate what we are up to so everyone at least have a hunch on whats going on in the product.

Rounded of the day by adding tests and refactoring new api endpoints that is in progress.

Tuesday

Started the day by adding more test to already written code. It’s the opposite of whats recommended, I know. But I’m new to writing tests for my code, give me a break. Tuesday means morning check-in at 9AM. A way of keeping up with the team that’s purely remote these days.

We continue the hunt for co-workers. Today there’s one interview scheduled for assessing the technical level of the candidate.

I was thrown in to a micro interview with another candidate 5 mins before the mentioned interview. It’s sort of the small company life, you get thrown in to stuff all the time and you need to like it.

Watched a bit on the HashiConf that revealed Terraform 1.0 and that sounds really interesting and I’m trying to understand what that means for us. We currently have a small part of the system in an infrastructure as code repo on Github. It looks like we could benefit from having more parts in Terraform.

Spending rest of the day trying to squeeze out a new feature to our beta environment which serves as a testing ground for all new things.

Had a support case where admins weren’t able to delete others chat messages, which is a feature that is supposed to work. Turns out that after the refactoring of the chat api, I’d forgotten that we now pass an ObjectId for the current user instead of a string as before. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Album of the day: Tool — Fear Inoculum

Wednesday

Got woken up by screaming kids that turned ALL the lights on in the room. Early mornings (5.30am) is the norm for our kids. Not sure where they got that from…

The day progressed with committing some code I wrote yesterday and bumping the max_capacity for our ECS service that serves the Heja Chat at the moment. The Datadog told me that sometimes we hit the ceiling of 5 tasks running at once, so I figured bumping it to 6 would be sufficient and maybe increase capacity during peak hours.

After a short meeting on behalf of the Home Owner Association, which I’m the chairman of, I prepared for more tech interviews with candidates. I think it’s only fair putting some time in to interviews and especially reading up on the person and be as prepared as I can be.

Took A walk with the wife in the nice weather during lunch break and also managed to sweep the driveway while talking to our CEO Mikael about recruitment. For me, working from home means a “no breaks and breaks all” mental state. As he asked; “are you on a lunch break or do you have time to talk” and I answered “Yes!”.

Interviewing a new candidate that showed real good potential and enthusiasm. Not sure how many times we’ve talked about our system to show candidates what they will be working on. After each interview we leave an evaluation in a system where we coordinate the hiring. That and meeting new people exhausts me. But it needs to be done in order to become more coders!

Ending the day by trying to go through a lot of code and nailing a new flow which is to be released. Having these chopped up days it’s hard to get in to a flow of coding. And especially when it comes to the last home-stretch where the plans and predictions need to meet reality.

Another “fun” part of working from home these days is that every day is a lottery when the kids get home from pre-school. Either it’s happy kids or tantrum avoidance on the schedule. Today was the latter. It’s hard to explain the calm when both of them finally are asleep and it’s quiet again!

Album of the day: Slomosa — Slomosa

Thursday

Thursday morning and chaos before work even started. A four-year-old isn’t a walk in the park…

Started the day by going through code for the new feature and trying to align all endpoints so they respond with the same structures. It’s a bit messy calling different endpoints and one is responding with data: { ... } and another one with data: { entity: { ... } }

We also setup a Discord server for the company to test out. The voice channel matches quite well what the remote working has taught us during the year. Seems quite nice to walk in and out of channels and having small conversations during the day.

Making small adjustments to the code all day and squeezed out a release in the beta/stage environment of the new feature.

Friday

Starting like every day last couple of years. Early wake-up call by a loud tv somewhere outside of the bedroom.

After initial system check and pretending there might be something in Slack that I haven’t already seen me and our CTO interviewed another candidate which turned out really interesting. We need to cut things short after 1,5 hours because I needed to go pick up the groceries at the store which was ordered beforehand.

Forenoon spent finding out why storing in a Keychain is so hard. All we want is our refresh token to be stored in a secure way. Turns out one need to think about if the app is in foreground or background when trying to get from Keychain on iOS. We also made sure that this is a “silent” error. which would be of a “won’t crash when in foreground” character. It would mean the users don’t really gets affected. But can of course be trouble in the long run if we can store and read from Keychain from the background.

Ate lunch in the sun. Not my cup of tea normally. But a Swedish “pytt-i-panna” calls for something special. Pytt-i-panna is like a bland paella with just squares of potatoes, onion and some sort of protein. In my case soy or similar vegan protein.

Left the home office a bit early to pick up the kids from kindergarten which is a really nice thing to do when the sun is shining and its warm outside so you don’t need to put on bunch of coats. As a swede you try to enjoy every warm day you can. You never know when there’s snow hitting the streets again ;)