Nathan joined GoodNotes 8 months ago as one of our software engineers, after being referred by a friend. While he started out working on backend projects, he’s now migrated to the Data Platform team, where he works on a cross-functional team to build our internal analytics platform.
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Here’s what he gets up to during a typical day in GoodNotes’ Hong Kong office.
9:50am
I arrive between 9:50am to 10am in the morning. The first thing I do is check updates in my email, Quip, Notion and Slack.
10am
I’m currently working on the Data Platform team, and every day at 10am we have a standup meeting. Our team is made up of colleagues that specialize in machine learning, data, and software engineering. I started out mostly doing backend engineering, but now on this team, I’m also doing data engineering.
10:15am
After our standup, I’ll join the crowd that’s inevitably formed at the coffee bar. Like most other people in the Hong Kong office, every morning I make a coffee to practice latte art.
I can’t taste the difference in different coffee… but I can see it.
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It’s nice to communicate with people from other teams, so I’ll usually stay to chat depending on how many people are there too. When there’s no one else making coffee, I drink pretty fast and I’ll return to my desk.
There is rarely no one else there:
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10:30am
This is the time I’ll spend grading take home assignments from engineering candidates, which they receive after an initial screening call.
Otherwise, I’ll go straight to coding.
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I use IntelliJ IDEA when coding in Kotlin, PyCharm for Python, and Visual Code for everything else.
12:40pm
At a certain point midday, I’ll suddenly feel like the air is silent, and I’ll look up to see that everyone’s gone. That’s when I know it’s lunch.
1:30pm
As if I hadn’t already spent enough time at the coffee bar, we usually have coffee tastings after lunch, where James and Patrick make hand drip coffees for us to sample.
This is when I pretend to know how different coffee from different beans tastes.
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1:45pm
Then it’s back to work.
I get to work with many others too outside of the Data Platform team. Since I’m responsible for ingesting data into the data platform, I get the data from strategic parties on different teams. So for example, if I need data from Jira, then I will find Rammy, our QA; if I need data from Zendesk, then I will find Denny, one of our customer support agents.
4pm
On Fridays, GoodKitchen (our in-house catering!) usually has some kind of dessert in the afternoon, so I’ll head over to the dining hall.
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6pm
When I need some suggestions on technical things, you’ll find me floating around nearby coworkers’ desks around this time. It’s helpful to also understand what others are working on and how I can learn from them.
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And that’s a wrap! Can you see yourself spending a day at work like this?
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