A day with our adessi: Hugin Roijmans

While working from home is nice, I also appreciate the chance to regularly collaborate with my team members in person. Today, I'm heading to the Rabobank office to meet them.

Traffic is bad, but the commute is not far, so I leave my car at home and jump on my bicycle. Cycling past all the traffic jams and conveniently parking my bicycle in the stand right next to the main entrance is a great way to get started.

This week I am the Man of the Week, which means that I’m responsible for all our applications to be up and running smoothly. So, first thing, I open my laptop and take a few seconds to check if all the graphs and metrics on the dashboard look normal. It looks good, time to grab a coffee and catch up with my team members.

At 9:30 sharp the scrum master takes our attention for the daily standup. He goes over the user stories one by one until he reaches the one that I’ve been working on. I give the whole team a brief update on the progress, while my colleague adds a few more relevant points that I forgot to mention. We’re working on this story together. There are a couple of stories on the board that no one has started working on yet, but the burndown is steady, and we expect to finish everything this sprint.

First, it’s time to decide who does what today. I'll pick up where I left off with my colleague, continuing the user story from yesterday. The product owner has prepared a couple of user stories. Let’s refine them before lunch so we’re meeting free for the rest of the day. Most of the stories are clear and we poker them right away. However, one of the stories is a technical challenge. We'll save that one for our next technical refinement session, where we'll solve the puzzle on a big whiteboard. But first lunch!

This is becoming a ritual; we’ll go for a walk to the mall near the station and get a Greek “pita gyros” at our favorite place. This is the perfect time to share gossip, take a quick stroll in the old city center, and stop by the Italian Gelato stand. If we hurry, we’ll still have time left for a game of pool or table football.

Back at the office, it’s time to start code crunching. We often work in pairs. Today we sit next to each other in the office, but usually, we do it online. Taking turns, one of us takes control of the keyboard as the “driver”, and the other keeps the overview and gives suggestions as the “navigator”. Pair programming helps us minimize unexpected surprises in pull requests, making it very efficient.

Coding is truly my greatest passion. So, this afternoon without meetings allows me to be fully focused and it passes by in the blink of an eye. Not only did we finish coding the feature, but we also got the pull request merged and the pipeline is busy running the tests and quality checks. One cup of tea later the pipeline is finished, and the feature is in production! That’s how I like to wrap up the day. There’s still time left for one rematch on the foosball table… But now it’s time to go home.

Back home I’m warmly welcomed by my wife and kids. At the dinner table, my kids are sharing numerous stories about their day at school. It was a busy day, but I feel satisfied looking back because we accomplished a lot and had a good time together with the whole team.

After the kids have gone to bed, I plan to go for a short run outside and enjoy the rest of my evening.