Max Graham

7.00 AM

I wake up, it usually takes me about an hour of journey time by public transport, so I don’t have the luxury of sleeping through my alarm. I pick out a nice set of clothes, put on my panda pin that each of our team members got as a gift from a teammate who just came back from overseas, brush my teeth, and head out. First, I catch a bus, then a train, and finally one last bus, all while listening to my favorite songs and using the transport time to message some friends and just relax before I get to work.

8.20 AM

Feeling starved from not having breakfast yet, I put my bag down near my team, say good morning to everyone, and then beeline it to the cafeteria. My usual pick is a bacon and egg sandwich. I try to not rely too much on a morning coffee but the cafeteria’s mochas are exceptional, so I give in and order a small mocha. Once I’m back at my desk, I can have a light conversation with the team about how everyone's weekend was while checking my emails and Microsoft Teams. Usually there will be some updates from the company in my emails, and some light banter in the graduates group chat. Finally, I check my project management tool, Jira, in case anything has changed in my tasks and projects.

9.00 AM

Time for daily standup for the Data and Analysis team consisting of a dozen members. We go around the room and tell the team what we did yesterday, what we plan to do today, and if there are any issues in our way. The sub-team I have been working with has been developing a dashboard for measuring the overall effectiveness of factory machines that are producing parts for our products. We call it OEE which stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Our project is about taking the data that is recorded from our factories overseas and transforming it by performing any necessary calculations so that we can display the performance of each machine as a nice and easy to understand percentage.

9:30 AM

Today's task for myself is going to be making an entity relationship diagram for the architecture of the data that the OEE team has set up. We had decided to build the diagram directly into our documentation, and to do that we decided to use a tool called Mermaid. Mermaid allows us to write simple connections between tables and automatically generates the diagram for us! It does its best to make the diagram neat and tidy, with the smallest amount of lines crossing over each other and therefore making it easy to read. However, when the diagram gets much larger, Mermaid struggles to keep it neat. That's why I have learnt some tricks to influence it to look how I want it to by changing the order of the connections in the script.

11.50 AM

I’m quite proud of what I have managed to achieve this morning. I have an initial version that looks neat and provides a quick and easy way to understand how all the data connects to one another. Unfortunately, there is still one connection that is forced to cross over another line, however for an initial design I’d say it's pretty good. So, just before I go off to lunch, I send the diagram to a more experienced member of the OEE team for review and head off to lunch.

12.45 PM

After lunch, I go to my desk and take some time to fill out my journal on what I have been up to. This diary makes the standups easier as I can just quickly look at my notes and get a complete refresher on what I had been up to the previous day. Next, I grab a coke from the fridge and have a conversation with one of the other members of the OEE team on a certain data quality problem we have been trying to solve.

1.30 PM

I get a notification from my team member. They have reviewed my diagram and given some suggestions for improvements. So, I get back to working on version 2. I make the changes and the markdown language Mermaid has tried to optimize it, but has instead made it very messy. To fix this I shuffle the different connections again until it is back to having only one cross over. Unfortunately, just like in version 1, this is a mandatory cross over. After one last check over the content I submitted it to the same person for another review.

2.30 PM

While I wait on feedback, I can continue to work on one of my other tasks. In the factories, every machine occasionally sends out a signal called a machine's heartbeat. Our team had the idea to take those signals and find large periods of time that the machine wasn’t sending any heartbeats and classify these as “outages”. One of the other OEE team members has already designed the logic in SQL code. My task is to take that SQL and convert it to Pyspark code to optimize its run time for performance.

4.00 PM

I have made some very good progress and I’m looking at getting the outage table ready for review and discussion within the next couple of days. Now, however, we have our evening IT social time. Every Thursday we have an after work sit-and-chat where we snack on chips and talk to relax and team build. Today we talked about the badminton club and the pets of different team members.

4.50 PM

Time to head back home. I say goodbye to my team and double check that my journal is updated with everything that occurred today before I start my hour-long journey home. The bus ride went smooth, and I ended up getting home a lot earlier than expected!

5.30 PM

After work I usually relax and play some online games with friends. Recently, I have been playing a lot of VR games which are good for exercise. However, if I'm feeling up to it, I will work on some of my personal projects. I have recently been getting into machine learning and image processing, and I’m currently working towards creating an automatic recycling sorter.

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