A day in the life of a CommBank Software Engineer

My team

I work in the DevOps team, where we manage and provide a bunch of tools for our entire developer community, to help them deliver quality and secure code. I’m primarily a Software Engineer, using technologies like Python and Bash to write code to extract data out of the tools we use including GitHub, TeamCity and Artifactory.

We work alongside many other teams in the Bank who develop our applications, such as NetBank, the CommBank app, CommSec Pocket and many more. These teams use a variety of languages including C#, React, Java, Kotlin, Swift and we assist them in securely storing, building and deploying their code to customers all around Australia. 

Morning

My workday usually starts anywhere between 8am – 9am, working from home means I have more time to go for long walks before work or even get some gaming in, which is one of my hobbies.

One of my typical daily tasks is performing code reviews for my team, so I usually start by reviewing code and providing feedback before moving onto my own work. 

The rest of my morning until lunch is usually spent focusing on my core coding tasks, as this is when I feel at my most productive. I love to put on my noise cancelling headphones, play some good tunes and code away. I try to minimise distractions from emails and instant messaging to power through my tasks.

My morning routine has had a very positive shift since we’ve been working from home more often. I used to leave around 7am to get to work – I now use that commuting time for myself and I’ve found I have much more productive mornings.

Lunch time

Most days I keep to my regular lunch time of 12pm, then then I may go for a walk outside, play some video games or have a call with friends/team mates and catch up.

Since working from home, we’ve all tried to avoid putting meetings in between 12pm – 2pm to accommodate the team and make sure we’re all taking a break.

Afternoon

We have regular team meetings everyday around 2pm to catch up on what we’ve been working on or calling out blockers – sometimes we use the time for some team bonding, where we play games like “virtual family feud” or “know your team bingo”.  It’s a great way to mix some social chats into the workday and stay connected to the team.

My other meetings are usually project focused - this could mean walking through some larger proposed code changes, catching up with stakeholders for new features or having one of our regular team meetings where we plan for the coming weeks.

One of my current projects is capturing metrics from our developer tooling that not only provides insights into how our engineers work and collaborate, but guides our team on where we can improve our tools. A recent example involved analysing the changing patterns of our engineers as we shifted to working from home more often. We looked at how engineers used this flexibility to work at the times that suit them best.

For the remainder of the day I’ll focus on coding and prepare my to-do list for the next day. Depending on how busy I am I usually finish between 4:30-5.00pm and if we’re getting some of that Sydney sunshine I’ll go for a longer afternoon walk.

At least once per week some colleagues and I will catch up and play some games over Microsoft Teams to finish off the day. I also play online games with some of them outside of work hours and in the evenings - a truly awesome way to bond over shared interests.

My work days can fluctuate as a crucial aspect of our team is supporting other engineers in the Bank, so at times I may be working directly with them to solve problems or help automate their pipelines to get the code from their computers to customers. Working from home has certainly been an adjustment, but the open and trusting attitudes in my team and across the Bank has made the experience stress-free and helped to maintain our team culture.