Ever wonder what it’s like to work at Tandem? In this series, we’re taking a peek into the everyday life of Tandem’s product designers and software engineers.
Morning
I just moved from the city to stay with my sister and nieces for a while, so this is my first workday with a totally new routine! I woke up at 6:30am and went for a 20-min walk with one of my nieces and she pointed out which houses had nice dogs and which houses had scary dogs.
Once everyone was on their way to school or work, I told their dog, Lucy, that I’d be right back because I wanted to go for a drive to find a coffee drive-thru, and she seemed to understand. Half an hour later, the coffee mission is accomplished, and I’m back home and ready to work.
9:15 a.m.
I set up my new office space last night so that I’d be ready today. I usually aim to be online by at least 9:30am, so at 9:15 I start by checking my Slack and e-mail messages. I like to keep a separate laptop open next to me where I have a daily to-do list and can type up impromptu notes throughout the day.
10 a.m.
We have regular check-ins on the team, and this morning I have a 1:1 with Caleb! We’re spending about half an hour chatting about questions and ideas related to the project we’ve been working on.
Noon
At noon I’m joining the company Lightning Round where we each share what we’re working on. Once that wrapped up, I shut my laptop, ate lunch, and practiced potty-training techniques with Lucy via pepperoni-flavored dog treats. Regretfully, that was unsuccessful.
I’m usually not hungry in the morning and tend to skip breakfast, but by lunchtime, I start to feel hungry. I always try to drink a lot of water and eat a decent amount of protein to keep my energy up for the afternoon, so today I’m having some leftover chicken tacos.
1 p.m.
After lunch, we have a daily check-in with the client team, followed by a meeting with their project lead. After these meetings, I’m checking in on some code that I had submitted for code review and I see there’s a great suggestion about how I can change the names of a few items to make the code read more naturally.
3 p.m.
Once I started renaming things, I realized that it was breaking some code downstream in the application and what I thought would be a quick edit turned out to grow into a larger refactor of a few components. Now I’m wondering if I should create a separate branch for that work. This is common, and I know that if I’m asking myself this question, the answer is usually yes — so that’s what I’m going to do!
4 p.m.
It’s 4 p.m. and I can feel brain fatigue starting to set in, so it’s time to wrap up what I’m doing. I’m saving in-progress code, updating my notes to account for things I’ll want to handle first thing tomorrow morning, and checking messages one last time before closing my laptop for the evening.
After Work
By the time I finished work, the girls and my sister were home from work and school. They came in to tell me that they’ve been waiting for me to finish so that we can eat dinner, but then they saw the code on my screen and were very curious about what it all meant. I tried to explain it but definitely failed. Oh well, it’s time for dinner: spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad!
My morning and evening routines are very different now that I’ve moved, but my workday is the one thing that has remained consistent over the last few months. Despite all of the challenges of the past couple of years, I’m grateful that we’ve been able to successfully adapt to a fully remote workplace, which made today so much smoother than if I had a long commute.
Do you want to work with Darcy and the rest of the Tandem team? Check out our Careers page to apply for our open positions!
