A Day in the Life: Frontend Software Engineer

A brief look into the life of a Frontend Software Engineer at Pulse Analytics.

About Claire

Claire is a Senior Software Engineer at Pulse Analytics. During her time at Pulse, she has worked on a number of projects from building interactive map components to dabbling in data scraping. In her spare time, she likes to build houses in The Sims, hoard books, and rate iced lattes according to a strict grading matrix.

Typical Day

9:30 am: I start the day with coffee. I suffer from being cold year-round but also have an aversion to hot coffee, so I drink my iced coffee in front of my space heater.

I like to spend some time in the morning mapping out my day and organizing my thoughts. I'll also use this time to look ahead to any meetings and review PRs.

10:00 am: A whiteboarding session with a colleague on a new feature. I've been looking forward to this particular whiteboarding session as this feature incorporates more dynamic data loading and frontend patterns. Since the patterns we establish now will most likely be adopted by other features, we've deliberately carved out time to thoroughly discuss and explore various patterns and document their scalability.

Since we don't have access to an actual whiteboard, we've gotten into the habit of whiteboarding virtually through either Invision Freehand or Excalidraw. I will say, not having to worry about taking pictures of the whiteboard before erasing it “just in case we need it later” has been great. We outline our top two options and schedule a meeting with the Back-end team to get a second opinion.

1:00 pm: Lunchtime! A few months ago, I realized that I'm probably not getting enough sun when my solar-powered keyboard died on me. Since then, I've been trying my best to make an effort to go outside for a walk or just sit by the window. I might be a plant? 🌿

I decide it's too cold to go for a walk today, so after lunch, I spend some time looking at potential White Elephant gifts for our holiday party. What started off innocently enough ends with me debating if I should buy myself a weighted blanket or not. (I did not).

2:00 pm: Donut buddies with my colleague Matt. Every week, we have a Slack bot that pairs us with a "Donut Buddy", and we're encouraged to spend time catching up. We used to have this back when we were in the office, but I found that having this system is significantly more valuable now that we're all working remotely. Since we no longer meet in-person every day, it's been harder to have organic conversations, so it's nice to have an opportunity for that every now and then.

Matt and I catch up on important life events (he got a puppy, I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender), hobbies we've recently got into (he's been making knives, I've been crocheting), and books we've been reading (he's reading a book about birds, I'm reading Circe).

Fun fact: a few months ago, a colleague and I used our Donut Buddies session to virtually attend Matt's wedding early!

3:00 pm: I've recently started working on the redesign of an existing feature. When the team saw that the redesign came with additional features for our charts, we all decided that we should take additional time to audit an alternative charting library that we've been interested in for quite some time. Our current library is great and feature rich, but the other library has smoother transitions, is open-sourced, and has an active community, so we wanted to experiment with it further. As I've been tasked with the audit, I met with our design team earlier this week to get a list of "must have" vs. "nice to have" features for the redesigned charts.

The audit starts well enough, but I soon run into a stumbling block when I find that it's not very easy to override certain default elements without a ton of boilerplate code. As I go down the list of must haves, I find that while charts are easy to get up and going, it's going to be quite a time-consuming task to get the new charts to parity with our current charts. I jot down my final notes and prepare to present my findings to the rest of the team later this week.

5:30 pm: Quick meeting to finalize plans for our virtual holiday party. I volunteered to help plan our virtual event and will be in charge of organizing our White Elephant gift exchange. Our gift exchange is made extra special this year by the fact that we'll be beta testing our teammate's White Elephant application that he made with his family!

We finalize our food budget, audit various origami videos, and brainstorm ideas for our scavenger hunt. All in all, a very productive meeting!

6:05 pm: I wrap up my notes from earlier and close my laptop. When we first transitioned to remote work, I found myself blurring the lines between work and home since I didn’t have a strict 6:12 PM train to catch. Since then, I found that the deliberate act of closing my laptop gives me a sense of closure for the end of the work day.

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