A day with our adessi: Jordy Zenik

Hi guys, my name is Jordy. I'm 27 years old and I have worked for adesso/Blue4IT since June last year I’m contracted at Alliander which is an electricity grid operator mostly situated in the eastern part of the Netherlands and this is what my day of work looked like:

Today Storm Poly messed up the NS schedules, and I found myself working from home instead of taking the train to the office in Arnhem. This meant I had the luxury of sleeping in a bit. After getting up, I had a delicious breakfast of oatmeal, proteins, and nuts to fuel up for the long day ahead.

At 9 AM sharp, we had our daily stand-up meeting using Microsoft Teams. It started with joking a bit about our colleague's houseboat possibly being blown over to England because he was a bit later. Eventually, we went over our Jira board and discussed the progress of open stories from the previous day and what each of us expected to work on today. None of us had open pull requests, so we did not have to review those today.

After the stand-up, we had a brainstorming session to design a new system called Mocky (I know our naming of products isn’t really original haha). This system will allow us to mock data from various systems within Alliander for end-to-end testing on our acceptance environment, as we currently don’t have an easy way to test some of these systems. During this session, we prepared some wireframes for the new system and had a productive discussion about its design.

After the brainstorming session, it was time for a much-needed cup of coffee. Feeling refreshed, I returned to where I left the day before, designing and writing down an algorithm in pseudocode. This algorithm needed to check if the various restrictions within customer contracts cover every hour in an entire year. This sounds like it is okay to do but using the data from our different internal systems and the need of using complex objects, combined with some crazy edge cases made this an incredibly hard task. The story is rated at 8 points which in our team relates to approximately a full sprint of work (2 weeks). To stay fit while working from home, I made use of my treadmill under my standing desk.

Eventually, at 12:30 PM I had some lunch and prepared a big meal of fried eggs, toast, and lots of vegetables. After my 1-hour lunch, I spent the first part of the afternoon pairing with my colleague Vangelis for three hours. Together, we wrote down a second algorithm using bitwise operations in pseudocode, hoping to increase performance.

After the pairing session, our team had a long discussion about which algorithm to use. In a surprising turn of events, one of my teammates Mitchel who has a GPT4 subscription asked ChatGPT for advice, and it came up with an even better solution!

With a better understanding of how to tackle our problem, I spent the last 30 minutes of my workday making a small start on coding the algorithm.

After a mentally heavy day, I finally logged off and headed to the gym for a workout session. This was the perfect way to clear my brain and ensure that tomorrow I'll be ready to tackle another day as a software engineer at Alliander/adesso/Blue4IT.