by Madi Bownass
Being a developer at EPIX is full of learning, challenges and asking for help. Every day is different but there are a few things which stay pretty much the same…
Work starts at 8am, though we’ll be lucky if the whole office is in before 8:15. We each have a personalised dashboard that shows what work we have assigned to us, so my first port of call is the very important ‘P1’ section where I am assigned emergency issues that need to be done that day. On a good day there are none and I get to continue where I left off the day before.
At 9am we will have our daily meeting. This is where we let everyone know what we have been working on since the prior meeting and have the chance to ask questions before everyone runs off to be busy again. It’s prime time for Chris to fill us all in on the interesting phone calls he’s taken, and for us to chase Ian and Mike for information.
The majority of a programmer’s job is looking on Google for how-tos and what’s this. There are plenty of common websites used by developers, the most famous of course being Stack Overflow, (like Reddit for even bigger nerds) so I am always learning, testing new ways to solve our customers’ problems more effectively or pestering all the other developers about how they would do it when it just won’t work.
Alongside my own coding, it is important that us developers check each other’s code to make sure we don’t all make the same silly slip-ups (as Mike always says, it’s only a mistake if you do it twice). This is our code review: testing and reading finished code to make sure it works without breaking other things. I’ll spend some time looking in the ‘needs review’ pot and try to break my colleague’s code and learn about new ways they do things.
Eventually lunch rolls around and somebody will ask where we’re going. A decision normally falls between Hatch and Society, but occasionally we stray from the norm and grab a Chinese or strange chicken box (it also veers towards McDonalds as the end of the month nears). We have a variety of diets at EPIX so it’s harder to find new places that satisfy all the requirements; thankfully the majority of the team will be happy so long as beer is involved.
After lunch it’s back to the desk, but not without the sound of some pool-playing stragglers. Often the most difficult part of my job is getting a new feature to work with what we already have. There are hundreds of ways to solve a problem, but not all of them work without breaking what already exists. Sometimes I’m lucky and stumble across a function one of my colleagues has made that does exactly what I want – or at least I think it does – other times Ian is stuck trying to help me fix the problem with his omniscience.
Throughout the day I’ll pick up some phone calls and try to help customers out with their queries, occasionally I even know how to help out (!) – otherwise Chris will get an enthusiastic phone call. But this helps me with future development work – as I learn more and more about how MARKUS is actually used by the customers I can make better improvements to it.
By 4:30 I will have learnt a new programming technique, created some interesting code, met somebody new and eaten some delicious food – a pretty great day if I do say so myself.
