At Unai, we recognise that while we’re technical experts, our company isn’t just built on software and technical proficiency. So much of what makes working at Unai special is in our culture, the people we get to work with, and the way things work around here.
Today, we’re letting you in on what a senior engineer’s day often looks like – as penned by our very own James Bradbury.
James has been a software engineer for over 20 years, and he’s been working at Unai for the last three. He’s sociable and energetic, and he’s something of a wizard when it comes to safety-critical systems and data engineering.
We’ll let James take it from here…
James’ first tasks of the day
It’s about nine o’clock when I boot up my laptop. Though you shouldn’t let the traditional time fool you. Some of my colleagues have been working for an hour or more already, some won’t appear until much later. Everyone has their own pattern of working here, but for me starting around nine means I can drop my daughter off at school and then crack on while I have a quiet house.
First I check Slack and Outlook – nothing urgent yet. I notice someone has posted about a zero day software vulnerability, so I give it a quick read before switching my attention to Jira and GitLab.
Today, I’m not working directly for clients. Instead I’m focusing on Ruleau, Unai’s in-house decision engine. This is still a pretty new project with huge potential and I’m happy to have a hand in it. Since the internal product owner understands the development process, the back and forth is minimal in meetings, and there’s plenty of time spent coding – which suits me.
The merge request I created last week has received some comments, so I make a start on addressing those. By the time I’ve finished it’s time for our daily triage with the Ruleau product owner and lead developer.
A quick discussion and a quick solution
Today our triage meeting is looking at something I’ve worked on, so I instantly get my head around the problem – and I tell the others I can take it on straight away. This isn’t always the case: I’m still new to the Ruleau project, so some of the issues aren’t always obvious to me, but when there are gaps in my understanding, more experienced team members are always happy to fill me in.
I set to work and this time around the code change by itself is pretty trivial. That said, we’ve discussed how testing in this area is a little lacking, so I build in another parameterized unit test to fill the gaps. Putting that together is a little more complex but I’m still done in less than an hour.
I make a merge request and check the end to end tests are still working – and then I tick this and other items off the checklist. That means I’m now ready for the daily standup.
The standup interlude
The standup is a meeting designed to be so short that you can comfortably stand for the entire duration. Some say standing up is too comfortable, and that you should try holding the meeting while in a plank position on the ground! Today, the standup stays true to its name, and it takes only a few minutes before we’re ready to get back to work.
Back to it – problem solving with the team
A little later my code fix is ready to go and the lead engineer has commented on my merge request. He’s suggesting that we need more comprehensive end-to-end tests.
He’s right but it’s a fiddly area. After struggling with it for a bit, I message the lead engineer on Slack. Luckily he’s free and we do a quick screen share so that he can point me in the right direction.
As the lead engineer leaves for another meeting, he lets me know that our mid-level engineer needs some help, so I jump on a call with him. The issue is with CSS and here I’m no expert – we don’t do much front end work generally – but we work through it together and manage to make some progress.
A spectrum of routines - a quick aside:
“There are all kinds of routines across Unai. One of the senior leaders prefers to get up at the crack of dawn and run half a marathon before starting work. Another finishes early on a Monday so they can run a coding club for kids – and plenty of our team are juggling Unai work and looking after their own kids.
When I first joined Unai, I was working closely with one of our Lead Engineers who is a complete night owl. He’d appear around lunchtime to review my morning’s work and give me guidance for the afternoon, then reappear as I was logging off to set me up to succeed the following morning, before returning to his own tasks until about 2am.”
All assemble for the Unai monthly update
Today it’s Unai’s monthly update, so I tune in at 12:15 with the rest of the Unai team. We hear about the leavers, joiners and staff “Unaiversaries” as well as how some of the projects are getting along.
Admittedly, this isn’t quite the sociable occasion it used to be. Pre-pandemic we’d gather around a table together and lunch would be prepared for us. These days we gather on a Zoom call but there’s still some informal chat at the start while we wait for others to arrive. A number of us met recently in Bristol and we’re looking forward to the next time we can see each other in person.
I have to say, I miss being in the office with people every day, but in a lot of ways we’re making fully remote teams work well for us. A bonus is that we now have team members all over the UK – and the world. It’s great to be able to get to know new people who can’t or don’t want to live near Bristol.
Deep work afternoon
Because I begin work later than most at Unai, I usually have quiet time in the late afternoon. It’s great to have this focus time to get to grips with trickier challenges.
I return to the fiddly end-to-end tests I began this morning. Although our lead engineer gave me great advice earlier, I still don’t make much progress for the first hour or so. Then suddenly, it clicks. I create all the tests I need.
As the day closes out, I notice there are a few loose threads to tidy up and document but it’s all easy enough. For a larger issue I would raise a new Jira ticket to triage tomorrow.
I’m told that Unai didn't always run this smoothly. There used to be much bigger meetings with clients and fewer touchpoints, which inevitably meant that communication was a little stilted, the goalposts moved, and information would often arrive in a large heap on your desk.
My own experience of Unai culture these last three years has been very different. Although today is a little different because I’m working on internal software, I’ve never had to face an information overload. There’s an easy flow of communication between us and our clients, and projects tend to stay on the straight and narrow because of it.
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