A Week in the Life: Lucy Nguyen, Zing Junior Developer

In a series of blog posts, we’re peeking behind the curtain and following Zingers as they go about their day-to-day work. Here, we look at a week in the life of Lucy Nguyen, Junior Developer.

Monday

🕣 Arrive at Zing HQ (London Paddington). The placements have our own space where we all sit together, share our experiences and help each other out. It’s a nice little group.

🕘 The week begins with a daily ‘stand-up’ with our client Alaska Maritime Physicians (AMP). Standups are quick meetings between dev teams and the client to keep everyone on track. AMP is a really interesting company that provides urgent and emergent telemedicine for the maritime industry, and we’re helping them set up Spoke Phone to use with buildNow (Zing’s Flex quick build contact centre solution) for their doctors to use.

We summarise what was done last Friday and discuss next steps for deployment.

🕙 Development work for AMP which includes writing up functions and testing with Twilio Serverless Functions. We’re almost at the end of the project and are wrapping things up.

🕚 Writing up documentation for deployment.

🕛 Helping co-workers with their functions.

🕐 Lunch!

🕒 Continue writing up documentation for deployment.

🕔 Slack Huddle with Senior Zing Developer Natalia to ask questions and set up PostgreSQL database. A customer project team typically consists of a project manager, a project Leader, and developers. Natalia is the project leader on this one and helps me clarify the customer requirements and reviews my work.

Tuesday

🕘 Work from home day (I usually do on Tuesdays).

🕙 Daily standup for 'Tactical Project'. Tactical Project is where the backlog is shared for multiple customer projects and is overseen by senior developer, Paul. We share updates on the project we're running for a provider of education courses. We deploy to their test account.

🕐 Lunch!

🕒 Customer meeting with AMP, where we discuss deployment and testing.

🕓 Update Zing customer success manager Nadine with client changes and deployment to test account.

Wednesday

🕘 Daily Standup for The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

🕚 Deploying to the test account for the the educational courses client project.

🕛 Lunch! Play table tennis with fellow Zingers.

🕐 Development work for IFRC.

🕒 IFRC project kick-off meeting, this is held internally with the team.

🕓 Creating ‘pull request’ (what happens when a contributor/developer is ready to begin the process of merging new code changes with the main project repository) on GitHub (code hosting platform) for Natalia to review.

Thursday

🕘 Start development work for education courses client project, making amendments to their Twilio Pay Plugin. Email client to check a few items.

🕙 Help other developers with their errors. Most of the time when we run into errors, we can look up documentation that references it and try to read the code. Eventually, we find the root of the problem and solve it.

🕚 WeWork (where we’re based) gives me free sweets Starbursts and Winders. Win!

🕛 Lunch

🕐 Finished making amendments to Twilio Pay Plugin for educational courses client. Posted message in channel for pull request review before we can push the code to the customer.

🕒 1-2-1 Meeting with Natalia, who is also my line manager. We both do a review on CharlieHR (our HR platform) and catch-up properly in the meeting.

Friday

🕘 Helping coworkers with Studio Flow (Twilio’s workflow builder).

🕙 Deploy to live account of educational courses client.

🕚 Development work for IFRC.

🕛 Fixing any errors that come up in client's live account.

🕐 Lunch - Every Friday is a Bubble Tea Friday 😊. Bubble tea is a Taiwanese recipe made by blending tea with milk, fruit and fruit juices, then adding tasty tapioca pearls. On Fridays we go and buy a selection of different Bubble Teas to try fromT4 Paddington.

🕒 Client live system works!

🕓 Development work for IFRC project.

🕔 Slack Huddle (catch-up over Slack) with Natalia.

🕕 Watch demo of CTRG Flex for Mobile. Senior Developer, Alexander shows how Twilio Flex can be used on Mobile, where agents can choose their status remotely.