Updating Results

nbn

4.2
  • 1,000 - 50,000 employees

Kristie Hui

Keen to learn what a day in the life of a Software Development Graduate looks like? Kristie talks us through her typical day when working from one of our Melbourne offices.

7.30AM

If you told me last year that I’d willingly wake up and get to the city at this time I’d call your bluff, but maybe I’ve secretly been a morning person all along but I just didn’t know since I’ve never actually tried getting up this early. My first task of the day is to grab a coffee and catch up with some news before heading to the office.

8.00AM

The morning begins with going through emails and writing down a list of things I want to achieve for the day. I write down things I want to work on today as well as track the progress of other goals I hope to achieve during the week. These goals vary but I’m currently working on upskilling in a few programming languages the team uses and completing my SAFe Agile certification. Mornings are usually when I get most of my work done so I focus on my main deliverables for the day and try to tick them off. I may or may not also spend a little too much time scrolling through the “Pets of nbn” page and heart reacting to everyone’s posts of their furry friends.

9.30AM

Second coffee of the day? Yes, please! As a team we always try out different coffee joints around the office, this time we visited a hidden gem tucked at the back of Flinders Street which had good coffee and hoops to shoot.

nbn Graduate Kristie Hui basketball

10.00AM

Back to the office we go, here comes our daily stand-up. We’re all gathered up at our board and we take turns telling the team what we achieved yesterday, what we’re working on today as well as any blockers we have encountered. Stand-ups are the best way to get help from the rest of the team; everyone always steps in to offer their help and blockers become resolved so much quicker.

10.30AM

I jump on a call with other senior engineers relating to an epic I’m working on. There are some changes from the business side that need to be implemented so I capture these changes. As I’m starting on the development work I come across a Transformation part of the ETL process that I’m unsure of so I turn to one my colleagues and he’s more than happy to hop into a meeting room with a whiteboard and go through the data flow with me. Sometimes these impromptu sessions can also allow other people in the team to learn something new and deepen their understanding. It creates a great platform for collaboration.

11.00AM

With one of the epics I’m working on close to being ready for production, I organise a call with the business owners to do a code walkthrough of the development work I’ve done and present the test completion report which shows that the required data is flowing and landing in the right locations. The flow shows the requested data is being extracted from a location and undergoes some transformation before being loaded in a database so that end users can query it.

nbn Graduate Kristie Hui pantry

12.00PM

In-between working at my desk and moving from meeting to meeting is… lunch time! Catching up with the other graduates over lunch is always the highlight of my day although finding a spot in the kitchen on level five can be quite a mission since it’s always packed. Since it’s pretty full today we decide to head to the office down the road to catchup with some other graduates in another building instead.

2.00PM

Catch ups with my lead are great, he’s always very supportive and understanding so it’s easy to ask him for advice as well as any questions relating to my work. We go through things like any challenges I’m facing to areas that I hope to develop and stretch myself on. These sessions have helped so much with transitioning from university life to full time work and have made me realise how much room we’re given to learn and explore new technologies and areas as a graduate at nbn.

3.00PM

Going through documentation relating to some architecture and design structures to get a rough idea of how I should write up my Design Document, I realise that we still need to seek some approvals from security, and I shoot my lead a message to confirm. I then move onto some testing work; I turn on the scheduler for ingesting data and run through the process end to end with different datasets to see if they pass the test. I record each one and continue down the long list of datasets.

4.30PM

I’m so grateful for having the flexibility to start and finish earlier. My coffee has definitely worn off and I’m on the train thinking of an excuse to skip the Body Pump class that I promised I’d go to, but my friend is persistent and is nagging me about how I always do that.

7.15PM

I step out the class, happy to have completed it and always glad that my friend made me join. A bad habit of ours after exercising is to get some milk tea. It cancels out whatever exercise we do but it’s always the best way to end a long day.