Morning
I start at 4.00 am (not kidding) to do a 40 minute PHA (Peripheral Heart Action) training session. I collect my breakfast before leaving the house by 6.00 am. YES it is still dark outside and YES I did shower.
I then have an exciting one hour drive to work in the iconic, world-famous, beautiful and scenic, bumper to bumper Sydney traffic. I use this tranquil drive to catch up with the news and a few short-format podcasts and then listen to an audiobook on Audible.
Once I get to work around 7.00 am, I do a quick check of my emails and reply to any urgent ones - this also gives me a chance to view my schedule and plan my day.
To kick start work I make my morning coffee with our work coffee machine (the most important equipment in the office). My team is normally in early, so we do our daily stand-up meeting to get each other up to scratch on where we are with our work. I then get into the fun part of my job, staring at code till breakfast time!
At 9.00 am I join the ‘breakfast club’ in the breakroom with everyone in the office. We talk about our day and anything exciting in the news. After breakfast I discuss the project schedule with the Project Manager and liaise with my colleagues on project tasks.
Afternoon
We break for lunch at 12.00 pm. Usually, most people bring in lunches from home but on Friday we have takeout day, where everyone in the office goes out to eat. Friday is also the day for team drinks after work.
Work hours are always flexible, so I am able to leave the office by 4.00 pm to make my personal training session at 5.30 pm. I then take my dogs (I have three Chihuahuas) for an evening walk. I then have the rest of the evening to relax, spending most of it either on Netflix or playing some games.
Now I haven’t included any detailed information on what I do at work, and there is a good reason for this. I work in Defence and much of what we do is classified. What I can tell you, there are days that are more exciting than others. An exciting day will see me testing a system build for tactical defence system, installing the build on the ship systems or performing test witnessing for a missile defence simulator.
Then there quite days are when I spend most of the time either dealing with bug fixes, optimization, pushing new features, creating interim builds, preparing for demos or documentation. Even though it sounds boring, it is interesting as no two days are the same. Each day I get to face new challenges and solve problems with my amazing team. Software engineering is a great career.