Zachary Browning

6.00 AM

Wake up time - My morning usually consists of going for a walk, doing my physio exercises, catching up on social media, having a shower and getting ready for work.

7.00 AM

I’m fortunate to live in Hawthorn right near our offices, so I get to work on my skateboard in less than 10 minutes!

8.00 AM

When I am working from the office, I always start my day the same way - fill up my bottle with soda water, grab an apple from the fruit bowl and find a desk. Most people start at 9 so it is usually pretty quiet when I get to the office. I really like this as it gives me some focus time to catch up with anything I have missed, do some reading on a topic that I’ve been wanting to learn and get a head start on any work for the day.

9.15 AM

As a Xero grad I get to rotate through 4 different teams. My current team has a daily standup at 9:15. We have a look at the jira board which we use to track our work, and discuss any updates.

9.30 AM

Tech huddle! My team of 8 is part of a wider group that works on the same product within Xero. We use tech huddles to stay up to date with what the wider team is working on, any important technical decisions that need to be made and any cool bits of code people have written. It’s an awesome safe space for me as a grad to practice sharing and communicating technical topics in front of other people!

10.00 AM

Time for some pairing. My current team works using Trunk Based Development, which means we push our code to the main branch all the time. In order to ensure our code is always peer reviewed, this means we do a lot of pairing! Today I am pairing with one of our team members who lives in Sydney, adding some analytics to our new feature that we are releasing in a few days time.

12.00 PM

Lunch time! I was too lazy to bring lunch from home today so I walk down the main street with some of my other grad friends to get some food. One of my favourites - a sticky tofu Banh Mi from what I would argue is the best Banh Mi shop in Melbourne!

12.30 PM

One of my favourite parts of coming to the office is playing ping pong!!!! Apart from being a lot of fun I’ve also realized it's a great way to meet new people in the office. Hot tip - if they bring their own ping pong bat to work, you’ve got no chance…

1.00 PM

Back to pairing! It’s my turn to drive this time. We finish off our task, push it and watch it go through our CI/CD pipeline to production. We then do a desk check, where we show our product owner and other devs what we did. We then mark the task as done. Time to pick up a new card!

2.30 PM

I have a 1-1 meeting with my people lead. We have a good old chat, but also discuss how I’m going, if there’s any support I need, and my Professional Development Plan.

3.00 PM

Team retro! We have fortnightly retrospectives to discuss how our work has been going. We discuss any issues the team faces, improvements to ways of working and new things to try. It’s also a time to give kudos to the great work that different members of the team have been doing.

4.00 PM

I finish work around 4 o’clock most days. Sometimes I stick around to chat with the other grads or play a bit of ping pong, but today I head straight home.

5.00 PM

 Off to the pool for a swim! My pool and gym is also right near the office, so it’s back on the skateboard for me to get there.

6.00 PM

Over consecutive lockdowns I’ve discovered catching up with friends at the park is fantastic - so today it's a BBQ and frisbee toss with a friend for dinner.

9.00 PM

Back home, ready for bed. I’d like to say I read before bed but usually I end up just scrolling on my phone for a bit before falling asleep.