Shaika Khan

Hi, my name is Shaika and I am one of the graduates who started their journey at Intergen in January 2019. Its been crazy fun and challenging year and now as an Associate, I thought I’d share with you what my day is like as a developer in the Digital Services team.

7.30 AM

Rise and Shine

As the pleasant sounds of the rubbish truck outside wakes me up, I tearfully part from my warm bed to the freezing kitchen to chow through some breakfast. Before long I am awkwardly running through town in my heels to work which is 15min away; one hand holding down my headscarf and the other my bag.

8.30 AM

Getting ready for the day

After wrestling my bag for the swipe card to catch the lift to Level 3, I home in on a desk near a heater and setup my laptop and monitors: my hub for the week. I check and respond to emails and accept video call meetings, catchup with friends, before making my way over to the kitchen for some DIY mocha and a Reddit read for the news.

9.00 AM

Stand up meetings

My day usually starts off with stand-ups for the projects that I am working on. During stand-up, the scrum master does a round table with all the members so we can report back where we are at with our tasks and if we are blocked by anything or if anyone needs help and advice on a piece of work. We also use this time to get an update on what our sprint board looks like now and what is coming up soon, such as; releases and tests.

9.30 AM

It is time to code!

For the current project I am working on, I look through the work items assigned to me from the current sprint and continue my work on those items. As a developer I use a range of software tools and frameworks to implement and test the feature or bug I am working on. If I need any help or guidance with something, I can discuss it with the Project Lead, and they can advise me on the right approach. At Intergen I can also reach out to anyone for assistance on anything. Currently, since my work is on front end feature development, I sit close to my team and other Front-end developers so that I can discuss things with them.  

10.00 AM

Sprint Planning Meeting

Every few weeks a project comes to the end of a sprint and the developers and scrum master have a sprint planning meeting to discuss what items can be worked on for the next sprint and how long they would take. For some projects I am in, the itemised list needs to also go through the Product Owner representing the client before we can start so that they can prioritise the work items further so we know which user stories, tasks and bugs we should start with.  

11.00 AM

Team quiz

I take a break from the coding with a fun quiz! Since we started working from home due to Covid-19 alert level 4, we formed a small group and have been tackling the daily South Island quiz before comparing our scores against the other Intergen offices around New Zealand. It’s a great way for me to continue my brain crunching and banter with colleagues but with a diversion from the usual lines of code to current affairs and cool facts. 

12.00 PM

Lunch

Lunchtime is my favourite time of the day, not only just for a wide range of delicious food available downstairs at Press Hall, but also to catchup with people and have great conversations with the occasional game of Uno thrown in.

1.00 PM – 5.00 PM

Code some more!

Onto more coding. Usually, after lunch, if I have finished my current task, I try to create a pull request to have my work reviewed by other team members while I also try and review their code. I smoke test the features and bugs that were completed in the release which was deployed to a staging environment, so I can check whether it is ready for the client-facing site or needs further work. 

5.30 PM

Home time

By 5.30 pm it's time to wind down work and send emails and meeting invites. I pack away my laptop and tote and do a few stretches and say a few goodbyes before grabbing my coat and heading home.