Monday

The weekend is over again. After I am installed at my home workplace, I start up my laptop to be on time for the digital Weekstart. This is a weekly update with the entire jem-id team where Jefry and Martijn tell us what is planned for the coming week. Because we mainly work from home due to the pandemic, this is done digitally. I myself am a member of the Floriday team. Floriday is a product for the floriculture industry that we are developing in collaboration with Royal FloraHolland.

This week is all about a new functionality in Floriday. As a back-end developer, I do everything I can to make the useability of the platform as easy as possible for the grower. This functionality certainly contributes to that!

The doorbell rings; a package from jem-id arrives with a nice card. The package contains various puzzles and fun goodies. "With this jem-id work-from-home package you will get through the week!". Tonight I start with the first assignment!

Tuesday

The working day for me usually starts around half past eight, so does today. Because we work with Agile methods, the day starts with a stand-up. This stand-up is always punctual at 9 a.m., so you are also expected to be present at that time. I prefer to be there a little earlier to prepare something for the day. Normally we always stand together in a circle and a ball is thrown to indicate who is speaking. It is important to remember who has already been, otherwise you may just run after a rejected ball!

Today it is just a bit different. Due to the Covid pandemic, we mainly work from home and the 'stand-up' will continue online for the time being. In turn, everyone indicates what was done yesterday and what the plans are for today. This is also a good time to ask questions and let me have a question for my colleague Tim. The answer turns out to be a bit more complicated than initially thought, and we meet later that day to discuss it with the two of us. The last person to act always has to come up with a yell to start the day motivated. Luckily it's not me 😉

For me, the planned part of the day will consist of being able to add attachments to orders and preparing the appointment with Tim.

Wednesday

After the stand-up, I'll get to work on the first point of the day, which is the functionality for adding attachments to orders in Floriday. Yesterday I had already started a research about the use of this functionality and what the possible requirements of the user might be. I discussed this in detail with Bas, Floriday's Product Owner, via a video call.

Now it's time to figure out how I'm going to put this together technically. It is important here that both the placer and the recipient can view the documents. We already have a .NET Core microservice that supports this. So it's important to find out what it takes to run this microservice. After some brain-teasing, I think I've found a solution. Because some major changes were made to the service not too long ago and I'm not sure about the dependencies with other microservices myself, I'm going to enlist the help of the colleague who made these changes. After discussing the idea, we came to the conclusion that the original idea needs a few adjustments but can be implemented otherwise.

Thursday

After the stand-up, I immediately started programming to make the necessary adjustments that I didn't get around to yesterday. I often put on headphones to stay in the flow and to keep my focus. I know that at the end of the day there is another tech meeting for which I have yet to prepare a presentation. These tech meetings are interesting moments where all developers within jem-id get the chance to share cool, new techniques or interesting tools with the rest. You can indicate it yourself if you have something interesting to present, but it can also happen that someone else asks you to share your knowledge here if they know that you are working on something interesting.

After lunch I perfect the last things for the tech meeting presentation and check whether everything technically works. This is the first tech meeting since we've been working from home, so we'll just have to wait and see if everything goes well. After this it is my turn to present the presentation I had prepared earlier today. I was asked to show something about our monitoring and visualization of application metrics. I'm talking about Prometheus and Grafana in particular; two tools I've been implementing for a while in the microservices our team creates and maintains. I am very enthusiastic about this and that makes it fun to tell something about it. It remains to be seen whether the other teams will also do something with this, but it never hurts to share knowledge and experiences.

Friday

Since we're working with Git, every alteration creates a merge request before committing the alteration to the application. If someone from the team has made a merge request, it is always reviewed by a colleague. In this way we not only ensure that the code is readable and the typing/thinking errors are removed, but you can also learn something from someone else. Both on a technical level and in knowledge about the product you are working on.

After reviewing a few merge requests, it's time for an online demo on how to use Kafka. I had already heard that we wanted to do something more with this and this demo gave me a better idea of ​​the use and the possibilities. Super cool to keep making the products you work on a little better!

The end of the Kafka meeting also immediately marks the end of the working week. I'll finish some posts and write down some of today's findings, so I'll know exactly where I left off with my projects on Monday.