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.
6 a.m.
My alarm woke me up around 6 a.m. today. It’s Monday so I hit snooze a couple times, but I’m actually wide-awake in bed scrolling Reddit. Eventually at around 6:35 I get up and get ready. My cats notice this and they look at me expectantly next to their food bowls. I give them a bit of breakfast before preparing my own. Today, I had two sweet steamed buns from dinner leftovers, a bowl of granola, and a cup of milk tea and I’m ready to start my day.
7 a.m.
I start work at 7 a.m. Pacific Time, working on a 9-5 schedule on the Chicago (Central) timezone. I’m not a morning person, but: cats. My grandma and mom stayed over last night, so the office room is occupied and I’m starting work at the dining room table. On most days, I first check Slack and read up on anything I may have missed over the weekend. Then I check emails before opening up Bitbucket to review any pull requests (PRs) that were made before the end of the day Friday.
8:23 a.m.
After reviewing PRs, I proceed to submit my own. It’s failing a test that passed on Friday and I’m wondering why. I cleared my local cache and now the test is passing again… and I’m still wondering why. For a sanity check, I’m running it a third time. By this time, my home office is open again, so I bring my laptop back into the room, but now my cat is sleeping on the office chair. I grab a dining room chair and sit next to her on the corner of my desk. At 8:23 a.m. PT / 10:23 a.m. CT, my tests pass. I create a PR (and triple-check my code) before picking a new ticket off the Jira board.
10 a.m.
Had our company-wide lightning round at 10 a.m. PT / noon CT. I delivered my update at lightning-speed (probably because I am well-caffeinated from this morning). Mina sent me a message to remind me to breathe. <3 I replied with a “gotta go fast” gif.
It’s early on the West Coast, but that’s not going to stop me from grabbing an early lunch. There are a lot of leftovers from dinner, so I grab some rice, steamed cabbage, walnut shrimp, and Chinese sausage, heat it up and indulge. While I’m eating, I watch YouTube videos.
10:52 a.m.
I’m back on the computer. I was working on a PR which included adding an SVG icon that already exists in the code but with some modifications. My colleague Francesca recently created a video for our team regarding how to properly extract SVG icons from Figma so I’m watching that. It’s incredibly detailed so I am pausing every few seconds and taking notes.
1 p.m.
Today we have retro to go over the sprint that ended last Thursday. We listed out our thoughts in columns labelled “Happy :)”, “Meh :|”, and “Sad :(“. From there we brainstorm and collaborate on finding action items and things we can do in future sprints to turn those frowns upside down!
3:11 p.m.
Right now, I’m sipping tea as I push my day’s bit of work. I still have to update my PR from this morning as there are now a bit of merge conflicts after another PR got merged in. After this, I’m thinking of opening a PR with today’s work and I might even review some apprentice applications before finally closing my laptop for the evening.
After Work
Today was a normal day, but I felt extremely productive and relaxed by the end of it. Later this evening, I’ll be watching more YouTube videos (recently, it’s been all Among Us videos!), finishing the rest of the leftovers, and hanging out with my cats and significant other before we call it a night.
Do you want to work with Meo and the rest of the Tandem team? Check out our Careers page to apply for our open positions!
