What’s it like to work as a Clojure Engineer at the Funding Circle team at Questers? To find out, we asked our colleague Dimitar Yoldov who has been part of the team for more than a year now and was eager to share some details about his workday and the challenges he is facing. Read on:
What does your typical day at Funding Circle team look like?
The integral first step in any engineer’s workday is to make coffee in the morning :).
After that, like in most other places, I’d start with checking communication – email, slack channels – for things that might have happened during US working hours. Examine alerts if there are any, check pull requests that need review, etc. Possibly act upon urgent items.
Afterwards, I usually work for a bit on previously started tasks, or if I haven’t picked one yet – I check the boards for open tasks and start working on one.
Later on, during our daily meeting, I sync up with my teammates. We have a bot that ‘elects’ a colleague to run the stand-up.
We discuss if anybody from the team is blocked and if so, we try to help them. If I have any obstructions, I share them with the rest of the team and see if anyone can help.
The rest of the day varies from day to day – sometimes there are meetings to sync up on larger projects, meetings to discuss progress with stakeholder teams and sometimes retrospectives or other Agile ceremonies. But most of the time it would be either grinding through some curious tasks on my own or pairing with a colleague.
On Fridays, sometimes I take time for self-development to work on improving my skills (we have dedicated time to do that).
What’s your favourite part of the job?
Working in a productive atmosphere to bring improvement to our services. Funding Circle is the first place I’ve worked for that puts so much focus on real teamwork. So much, so that one of our core values is “Stand Together”.
And the most challenging?
For me, the most challenging part was working with such huge software environments! Our system is big, probably as a necessity of the use case we’re trying to solve. As an engineer, it’s been interesting to have exposure to so many different technologies, large-scale services and processes.
What new skills have you picked up while at Funding Circle team?
Plenty. But if I had to name one, I’d go with better work planning and organization.
Being part of Funding Circle, I picked up the habit of identifying potential problems beforehand, discussing them with the team and finding time and resources to provide a timely solution.
Name the top 3 things that make Funding Circle team awesome.
1. My opinion can be heard. No idea is discouraged unless it has undergone thorough а discussion. The atmosphere is very open.
2. The work is interesting and challenging. I can’t remember a day when I was bored by procedure or repetitiveness.
3. The people are great – experienced in their respective fields, while also eager to help if you get stuck.
Already eager to join Dimitar’s team? Here are a couple of opportunities.