Week in the life of a Software Expert (and father)

This story is a diary of my daily work and home life. While most of these diaries start from Monday, I made an exception and started this on Thursday instead. Also a diary for a single day sounds a bit boring as no day is the same so I extended this for a whole week.

The story got quite long so please bear with me ☺ Of course if you are only interested in my professional life, just skip the weekend and evenings.

Thursday

• 6:50. Wake up as my younger son, Osmo, starts his morning with a cry. Seems like, again, I slept over my alarm at 6:30. Brush my teeth, fix my hair and off to work! Sun is shining and it’s +8 degrees so pretty normal summer day in Finland.

• 7:23. Arrive to work. Oh snap, I am tired. Have to get my first cup of coffee and fill the water bottle. Have a short meeting over coffee with my AUTOSAR colleague to sync up with their progress in the project and having overall chit-chat.

• 8:02. Grab another cup of coffee, I really need it this morning. At my desk, time to catch up on email and calendar. Only 5 meetings today, pwwhh.. And my password seems to be expiring again — I really hate this policy.

• 8:15. Time for morning code reviews. Couple of new features seems to be on the list.

• 8:32. Code reviews done, few comments here and there. Time to start an implementation task for simple ISO8601 Duration C++ class.

• 9:30. Daily stand up with the team (and yet another cup of coffee). Going through what was done yesterday, what is going on today and if there are any problems. Nothing out of the ordinary here. After the meeting I continue to write unit tests for the implementation.

• 10:19. Done with implementation and unit tests. Time for short toilet break and prepare for another scrum meeting at 10.30 with another team.

• 10:58. Meeting over and another code review done — this time for Java code and for another project. Started to update a technical reference document to match with newest features for the upcoming release.

• 11:47. Lunch break with part of the team. Had some very nice lamb meatballs with herb rice and sauce with side salad.

• 12:15. Documentation continues. Few interruptions from team mates asking about how they should handle some special cases in their implementation.

• 13:00. Meeting for checking the preliminary assignment for upcoming Software Project Execution training. I really appreciate this company for organizing training for employees.

• 13:17. Technical reference document update continues with a fresh cup of coffee.

• 14:00. Meeting with colleagues about how to improve innovation inside the company.

One innovation: “Coffee robot” @ our office (Check out the whole video)

• 15:18. Meeting took a bit more time what was planned (mostly because 2/4 attendees were late). Created tag for our next release before leaving the office. Sun is still shining.
• 15:41. At home finally. The road construction on the highway slows down my commute quite a bit. Biggest news at home were that my older son, Eemi, had successfully made a poo-poo in the potty. First thing to do is to boil some carrots for the dinner.
• 16:07. Playtime before dinner. Today’s first choice seems to be cars. Some serious traffic ahead!

• 16:28. Eemi decided to put his underwear on top of the trousers, you know, the superman style. I followed his style, we had a good laugh and after I started to prepare potatoes for the dinner.
• 16:43. My wife, Eeva, returns from her walk with our dog. Time to feed the children.
• 17:18. Dinner time. Osmo is taking a nap and Eemi is watching children’s show called Pikku Kakkonen (which translates to English as “Little Number Two” which at least in Finnish sounds a bit, well, bawdy) from TV.
• 18:34. Back inside from doing some gardening work. Had to get rid of the roots of a tree my wife had cut. Or so I thought… Casualties seem to be unavoidable when it comes to gardening without listening the instructions first.

Roots, bloody roots

• 18:57. Time for porridge, change of diaper and night clothes for Osmo not forgetting brushing all of his 6 teeth. Same steps for the older one. Eeva is continuing gardening work outside.
• 19:40. Cleaned the kitchen and vacuum cleaned some floors. It’s really annoying when you have a family member who only crawls (not talking about myself this time 😎) and floors are full of dirt.
• 20:16. Reading a bedtime story for Eemi.
• 20:42. Both kids are asleep (or at least in bed). Finally. Time for evening snack and netflix with my love (no, it doesn’t mean “Netflix and chill” 😉). We just started new series called Safe and it seems promising.
• 21:30. Another episode of Safe.
• 22:22. Off to take a shower and go to bed to read few pages of Chris Voss’: Never split the difference before turning the lights out and shutting my eyes. Disabled alarm clock for the morning.

Friday

• 7:48. Woke up when my wife poked me in the back. We are going to be late! My wife prepares a fast breakfast for Eemi while I change two diapers, brush my teeth and fix my hair.
• 8:19. Time to take Eemi to “daycare”. I drop him off and continue my drive to work.
• 8:47. At work. Time to check out e-mails and calendar for today. Get my first cup of coffee and start updating the same technical reference document from yesterday.
• 9:30. Retrospective and sprint planning meeting. Seems like we accomplished quite a lot during last two weeks and it also looks like we have a lot to do for the next two weeks.
• 11:30. Knowledge sharing telco for the project. After 8 minutes of silence it seems that there is nothing to share. There was some public holiday yesterday in Germany so I think the one who should be presenting is out of office. This kind of waste happens too many times.
• 11:47. Lunch break. Some chicken with rice and pita bread. Cup of coffee for dessert.
• 12:22. Found out a bug in our development environment which explained failures in the CI build system. Bug was caused of missing CMake toolchain file parameter. Fixed that with simple two line change.
• 13:06. Finalized the technical reference document. At 13:00 some project introduction sessions started at the cafeteria. Purpose of these sessions is to give short introduction of projects in EB in case people want to do job rotation inside the company. I have other things to do so have to skip those for now. Started an implementation task of another small C++ class. This one is so easy task I need to listen some Mors Subita to take the edge off.
• 14:30. Actually ended up implementing 3 new classes with unit tests. Deadline for Monday is too close so we need all hands aboard to finish rest of the easy, but time consuming tasks. We got new native linux desktop machines just few weeks ago and it has dramatically increased the development speed — it also means the printed XKCD cartoon at my work place is not valid anymore:

• 14:59. One of our trainees asked for help with his implementation. Apart of the technical discussion we wondered how many lines of code our module has. I didn’t know the answer so had to check with cloc. Seems like we have produced around 60k lines of code (comments excluded) in one year with 4 developers. No idea how it’s compared to other projects though but in my opinion it’s good achievement.
• 16:20. Helped our trainee with rectangle C++ class implementation. There is a company’s barbecue party outside so I think I will drop by and have some chats with people before going back home.

• 16:52. Time to head back home. It would have been cool to stay at the party a bit longer but duty calls.
• 17:15. Back home and it’s dinner time. Today we are having some hamburgers mmmmm..
• 17:38. Took our bikes and drove to shopping mall Zeppelin to buy a ticket to Qstock festival for my wife and visit pharmacy.
• 18:37. Bike ride back home.
• 19:02. Off to the nearby forest for a run with our dog. Weather is really nice but seems that the mosquitoes have already taken over the forest. Have to keep good pace on this run.
• 19:39. It’s hot and sweaty. I need a shower.
• 20:06. Brushed Eemis teeth. Soon it’s bedtime for him, Osmo is already in bed. Mythbusters is on so we watch it together for a while. I love this show. Eeva went to visit the local grocery store.
• 20:48. After bed time story it’s time for one beer and evening snack with an episode of Safe.
• 22:07. Brushing my teeth. Next to the bed and some reading before shuteye.

Saturday

• 08:07. Eemi comes to our bedroom to wake me up. We go to the living room to watch some cartoons. Eeva and Osmo continue sleeping.
• 08:23. Time to make some coffee. I hear that the rest of the family woke up.
• 09:05. Breakfast done. Time for teeth brushing and after we go to landfill with Eemi to take out some trash from the garden.
• 11:55. Another trailer load of garderning thrash shoveled. Now time to drive to Eeva’s sister to drop them off as the landfill won’t accept already composted waste.

• 13:42. Back home. I eat some tuna and egg salad for lunch. Eemi just woke from his daily nap, Osmo is still sleeping. Eeva leaves for a walk with the dog.
• 14:07. Watching some Moomin cartoons with Eemi while drinking coffee. Need to fill in the shopping list for grocery store visit later today.
• 14:42. Time for afternoon snack for the boys. An apple for Eemi and a banana for Osmo. More coffee for me.
• 17:14. Back from the grocery store visit with Eemi. We also stopped at petrol station to fuel up the car and get some fuel for the lawnmower. Eeva is preparing rhubarb pie and potatoes for the dinner.
• 17:40. Out to grill some pork and halloumi cheese. One beer while grilling is a must!

• 18:06. Eeva’s another sister came for pie with her youngest son. Eemi was very pleased of the guests.
• 19:01. Guests left to see the latest Avengers. Time for evening snack for the boys. Porridge for the smaller one and wheat yogurt for the older.
• 20:11. Taking the dog out to the forest for a short walk. Damn these mosquitoes.
• 20:43. Taking a shower. It’s weird how dirty you can get by doing some shoveling.
• 21:03. Some sandwiches for snack and one episode of Safe. It’s been quite exhausting day and I’m very tired.
• 22:43. Brushing my teeth about to go to bed. We ended up watching 2 episodes of Safe and now we only the season finale left.

Sunday

• 04:32. Woke up with an software idea in my head. Thought about it for a while, wrote it down for future and continued sleeping.
• 07:58. Woke up as Osmo was tickling my neck. Also Eemi woke up few minutes later and came to our room to participate in whole family wrestling competition.
• 08:19. Started morning by cleaning the coffee maker. Watched some cartoons with Eemi. I like to start Sundays slow.
• 09:03. Breakfast with the family. Eemi turned on the PlayStation and we played some Need For Speed together. It’s not very easy thing with such a small hands so I helped him by pressing acceleration while he was taking care of steering. Yes, we crashed multiple times.
• 10:20. Time to start preparing fishsoup for the lunch. First I need to empty the dishwasher.
• 11:18. Fishsoup is boiling. Eeva is cutting the grass outside. We are doing puzzle with Eemi. He is really good with these things and is able to solve puzzles designed for double his age. Don’t know where he gets it though — maybe from his mother.

• 11:48. Lunch done for the boys of the family. Eeva just finished lawnmowing.
• 12:14. My parents came to visit over coffee and pie. We left with Eemi and Osmo to help them carry some construction stuff because all of their cars are missing trailer hooks.
• 15:06. At my parents place with the boys. Boys are playing with my brother with Duplos. Looks like it might rain today.
• 16:25. Back home. Got a request from management to wash the toilets with high priority.
• 16:51. Helping Eeva with the dinner by cutting some vegetables. Chicken tortillas are on the menu.
• 17:32. We went outside with Eemi to plant some grass seeds and water them.
• 19:31. Off to football “practice”. We have been playing couple of years every sunday with people living in the same town. It’s one of the weeks highlights for me and I really enjoy it. Light rain starts when I hit the field but it doesn’t last long.
• 22:04. Back from the football training through shower. Some small evening snack and off to bed. I have a feeling it’s going to be tough next week..

Monday

• 07:07. Woke up as Eemi stormed into our room. TV on for him and I go to do my morning brush up.
• 07:26. Start my commute to work. It’s very windy and cloudy day. And cold. Hrr..
• 07:48. At office. First I need a cup of coffee, I can still feel yesterdays football practice in my legs. Check my email, calendar and Hacker News for the latest stories. Damn, Microsoft is buying Github. This could be bad news for open-source community.
• 08:23. Taking over one implementation task from a team member who is out of office and could not finish it Friday. Also refactoring and fixing some implementation by our trainees. Seems like the learning curve is steeper than I thought.
• 09:30. Daily stand up. Sprint should have been completed on Friday but we really want to deliver also few still on-going features. We need to get them done today and fast. Coffee.
• 10:43. Finished with the implementation and unit tests. Now just waiting for others to finish so we can wrap the delivery in nice packet and deliver for integration. Seems like there is some architecture work to be done once we complete the sprint.
• 11:37. Just got a message in LinkedIn from a friend congratulating of my 1st work anniversary at EB. The year has gone very fast and we have tackled a lot of things together with the team. Hopefully the same pace continues during next year.

Pad Thai @ Eksotik Fusion

• 12:27. Left for lunch to nearby restaurant, Eksotik Fusion, with part of the team. Had great Chicken Pad Thai and salad. Today there is all kinds of celebrations for me as: one team member bought a house, I have the work anniversary and Osmo turned 10 months.
• 13:05. Back at office. Need to fix some CPPLint warnings in our code. I see that these static analysis tools are very nice but everyone should remember to check those before pushing code changes. Using these tools may be annoying but it really helps with the code quality in the long run.
• 14:00. Coffee break with the team. Team member who bought the house brought some sweet buns to celebrate the deal. I am feeling stuffed, ugh.
• 14:28. New sprint was opened. I think I will spend the next few days working on drawing an architecture of a new C++ library and it’s interfaces. I really need a new monitor because the tool I am using for this is on my laptop and both of my screens are connected to the Linux desktop machine. Or maybe I just check if can use the tool on Linux.
• 15:52. Started with the architecture design. Still some open questions but I hope I get the idea how to do things tonight. Usually ideas come, at least for me, when you are not actually thinking them but doing some other things instead. Time to jump to the car and drive back home to see what’s going on there.
• 16:28. At home and warming up yesterdays fishsoup leftovers for dinner. Eeva and Eemi are about to hit the grocery store and take out some recyclable trash.
• 17:03. Fed Osmo and now trying to get him to take a nap. It might be that I get some quiet time if he falls asleep.
• 17:14. It’s quiet. Now I have time to order new filters for the ventilation unit of our house. One of the things that has been on a long TODO list for way too long.
• 17:43. Osmo woke up from short nap. Time for some music and hanging around. Osmo has some really cool dance moves for his age 🤘

• 18:20. Eeva and Eemi are back from the store. Soon it’s time to start preparing evening snack for the youngest ones.
• 19:11. Feeding the children, again.
• 20:02. Osmo is going to bed. Eemi told that he will grow to be green Hulk, I am going to be red Hulk, Eeva is going to be black one and Osmo is going to be batman. I can’t always follow him but it’s fun.
• 20:45. Both boys are in bed. Time for small snack with Eeva and the final episode of Safe.
• 21:35. Well that was exciting last episode — got my heartbeat up.
• 21:42. Got an totally random email from Germany from a person who had read my story about Adaptive AUTOSAR and wanted to do Masters thesis on that. Replied him as well as I could.
• 22:12. In bed. Checking out if there is any interesting stories in Hacker Noon.

Tuesday

• 07:02. Woke up, missed alarm again. I wonder if it even makes sense to have the alarm as I, most of the days, just snooze over or ignore it.
• 07:17. Eemi woke up so change of diaper and turn on some children’s show for him. Brushed my teeth and left for work.
• 07:41. At work. Yesterday I read about this cool application called IFTTT (IF This Then That). It allows automating things based on your location and between different applications. As our company policy requires to mark your hours for each day and I cannot always remember when I came to work and when I left, this tools is very useful. It creates an Google Calendar event whenever I enter the area of my workplace and whenever I leave the area. It also has other useful applets for automating things. I suggest you check it out.
• 08:12. Continuing the architecture design. Installed the architecture design tool on my Linux machine which makes it much easier to do the work.
• 09:30. Daily stand up. It’s new sprint so lots of questions arise what to do next.
• 09:44. More coffee. And architecture design creation continues.
• 10:30. Another scrum meeting with another team. There is some problems with automatic tests in the CI system, wish I had time to check what’s wrong. Maybe have to postpone this for tomorrow.
• 10:32. I was asked to prepare some C++ interview questions for tomorrows job interview. Have to spend some time for this later in the afternoon. Designing continues.
• 12:04. First version of the design is ready and can be shown to team members. Have to get some feedback and fix if there are design flaws. Time for lunch.
• 14:00. Meeting to prepare for the training next week. We go through software configuration management of one EB project with project team member.
• 15:00. Preparation for C++ interview. Created simple example application which describes C++ inheritance and virtual functions with some questions and answers. Had a team mate do quick code review for the questions and answers.
• 15:58. Time to head back home as Eeva has Agility practice with Ohmi. Currently there is too much different things ongoing at work, cannot really focus on one thing. Before leaving had to agree a short meeting for tomorrow with a colleague from another, new, project.

Seems like rain is in the forecast

• 16:20. At home finally. Food is ready which is really good thing.
• 17:05. Fed the children and myself. Time to watch some Pikku Kakkonen.
• 17:43. Playing with Duplos. Batman is going through some g-force training. While Duplos are cool, I am still waiting for time to construct some Legos with the guys.

Batman says: “WOOOH”

• 19:07. Time for evening snack for youngster. Osmo is a bit cranky as he skipped his last nap of the day.
• 19:42. Took both boys to bath/shower. Changed them to night clothes and brushed their teeth.
• 20:06. Finally some alone-time. Out for a run. Damn my legs are still hurting from Sunday.
• 20:42. Shower. Evening snack and an episode of Gotham with Eeva.
• 21:54. Did some stretching while watching TV. Now off to bed to read the book and have some sleep.

Wednesday

• 06:28. Woke up before my alarm! Another day I don’t need the alarm.
• 06:52. Had to stop by the service station to check tire pressures of our car as it was complaining about that yesterday.
• 07:08. At work, need a cup of coffee. Some refinement needs to be done for the interview questions still.
• 08:19. I think the questions are now okay and can be reused later for other interviews. I created a git repository with questions and answers and also some live code examples. Now I could pay some attention to the Java unit test problems to see why they are failing.
• 08:46. Need to do some missing reviews for implementation tickets.
• 09:30. Two daily stand ups. Nothing unusual here.
• 10:15. Helping a team mate with Java unit test runs. Finally after an hour or so we got all the tests passing.
• 11:47. Time for lunch with part of the team. It’s chiliburgers and french fries in the nearby restaurant!
• 12:45. Time to join the job interview with my C++ questions. I have done multiple job interviews in the past but now it’s different (and more fun) as I am only doing the technical part.
• 13:21. The candidate did pretty well with the questions even he was just finished his studies. Noticed that there is still some improvements that could be done to the questions but at least we have some base where to start from. Time to do some more fixes for the Java unit test running.
• 14:15. Architectural meeting with another expert who is part of a new project. Coffee.
• 14:51. Meeting over and I think I had something to share with my colleague to help him achieve his project goals. Time to read emails that have been stocking in my inbox. Oh damn, seems like Continental is banning Whatsapp and Snapchat on companys phones. I suppose it’s time to visit phone store soon — after all Elektrobit is part of Continental group.
• 15:46. Wondered why our example applications are not working anymore. Seems like changes to specification have broken those and they are, once again, only noticed when doing the integration. We should have someway to automate this so we could see the problems at the time they occur..
• 16:14. Stop at nearby market to get the filters I ordered on my way home.
• 17:02. Dinner time with the whole family. Macaroni casserole is on the menu.
• 17:34. Playing with the kids. Eeva went for shopping some outdoor clothes for herself. My head hurts — maybe it’s because of dehydration or lack of fresh air.
• 18:46. Off to the forest with the dog. Hopefully mosquitoes are hiding as it’s pretty windy outside.

Ohmi in the forest

• 19:36. Back from the forest. Got some ideas how to implement one functionality during my walk. Have to draw the design tomorrow.
• 20:02. Emptying dishwasher with Eemi. He is good help in this task.
• 20:16. Bed time story for Eemi. Eeva started to bake some pie for tomorrow as she will have some guests visiting.
• 20:42. I make some sandwiches for evening snack and help Eeva with the pie.
• 21:05. Time for one episode of Gotham.
• 21:56. To bed through shower. Maybe I read book a bit before falling to sleep.

Conclusion

Congratulations if you got this far and made it through my week! Past week has been very normal one. Next week would have been much evetful as: I am participating in a training, the company is organizing cooper’s test and crazy summer party, there is one birthday party coming and last but not least, I am going to go parachuting for the first (hopefully not last) time.

My life might seem dull, even boring, but actually it’s the little things like good laughs with my family, successes at work and exercising what makes it worth living. After the week reading my own story I feel like have a lot on my plate. The workload might sometimes be too much for one person but priorization and delegation can help a lot with that.

About me

I am Heikki Hellgren, Software Expert and technology enthusiast working at Elektrobit Automotive. My interests are in software construction, tools, automatic testing and all the new and cool stuff like AI and autonomous driving. You can follow me on Medium and Twitter. Also you can check out my website for more information.