By pushing features and extinguishing bugs, we complete our work terms more prepared for what’s to come next. Every co-op experience is unique, so allow me to take you along my journey at Relay!
My name is Sarah and I’m a software engineer co-op on the Core Banking team. I recently finished my third year studying Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, and will be spending the next twelve months at Relay. Now that I’m two months in, it’s time to share the scoop!
So without further ado, welcome to a week in my life filled with (coding) bugs, good food, cute doggos, and much, much more.
Monday
Rise and shine, everyone! It’s the start of a new sprint cycle!
Similar to many tech organizations, the engineering teams at Relay work in two week sprints. What makes my team special, however, is that we name our sprints after cheeses, going in alphabetical order. Last sprint was Kashkaval and this sprint is Labneh. My manager would argue that labneh is yoghurt, but for the duration of this article, let’s settle on labneh being cheese.
The first order of business is standup, which keeps everyone in the loop and orients our compass for the day. My main update was that I was wrapping up a large ticket that I’d been working on for a while. Standup is a great way to learn about everyone’s work, and while some terms and acronyms are still flying over my head, my Relay vocabulary is growing steadily.
This task that I’m working on spans several repositories and at first, I kept losing track of important files. However, I recently started writing more detailed notes for my tasks and it’s been great having a centralized document for links and scribbles. Admittedly, I still get confused at times, but at least I now have an action plan.
By the end of the day, I got my pull request approved and merged (check out this article to learn about Relay’s deployment process). At last, my ticket was done! Or so I thought…
Tuesday
On Tuesday, the office comes alive. Relay has a hybrid work model where everyone comes into the office on Tuesday and Thursday, and the rest of the week is remote. On these days, I have one-on-ones with my mentor, during which I blast through a barrage of questions and spend time catching up on our lives. Doug, if you’re reading this, you’re the best!
To celebrate the start of the new sprint, one of our teammates brought labneh to share. He went all in with a decadent display of pita bread, olive oil, and za'atar.
After a morning of coding, it was time for lunch. Relay provides lunch twice a week, meaning that we get to pick from a variety of restaurants and get our food delivered straight to the office. Today, I got fish tacos and ate with my fellow co-ops.
Another highlight from today is that I met Saga! Relay is a pet-friendly office and so four-legged friends are sometimes spotted roaming the floors.
The rest of the day was spent working on new tasks and doing some code review before I logged off to play beach volleyball with my coworkers. We unfortunately lost both games, but in my heart, we are always the winners.
Wednesday
Wednesday was one for the books.
As I logged on for the day, I was pinged about an end-to-end test that had been failing. It turns out that the feature that I pushed on Monday had changed some functionality which was causing the test to fail. As I was fixing the test, another Slack message came my way. This time, it’s a message alerting me that our Datadog logs were showing errors for an endpoint.
You guessed it - I wrote this endpoint. Instead of a happy green status 201, the server was throwing the dreaded error 500.
At this point, I am panicking a little. I reach out to Doug, who walks me through the process of reverting my changes and communicating with anyone who could potentially be affected by this error. Doug joked that “you don’t really work here until you break something” , and together, we identified the bug and prevented the erroneous code from affecting more users. In turns out that while the majority of the code was solid, there was an edge case that my unit tests didn’t handle.
Wednesday’s mishap was a reminder of my responsibilities as a software developer and Relay employee. We’re building really cool products to help small businesses thrive and the code that I write is a part of that mission!
Thursday
In true Gen Z fashion, I delivered my Thursday standup with a meme-filled slide deck, detailing the previous day’s adventures. The remainder of the day was then spent fixing my bug. A big focus for today was working on context switching and knowing when to take breaks - I sometimes find myself wanting to stare at my code until it miraculously fixes itself (it doesn’t) or tunnel visioning into one solution. Time boxing has been a great way to combat this and I’ve also been enjoying taking breaks with other co-ops, which may or may not involve taking ginger shots.
My day was cut short, however, due to an internet outage. Although I could no longer work on my coding tasks, there was other work to be done! Relay’s big summer soirée is happening next week and so I helped with assembling swag bags.
Thursday would not be complete without meeting another furry friend, so here’s Kylo!
Friday
Friday was a day of focused work and steady progress. I was ready to release my fixes for Wednesday’s bug and also investigated a task which involves writing a script to iterate over several tables in the database. Altering databases often incites my fear of breaking something, so I was nervous but excited to work on this script! I then wrapped up the day by putting up summer-themed stickers all over the office in preparation for the summer soirée. Who knew putting up stickers would be such a fun and relaxing activity?
… and just like that, the week has come to an end. This week had no shortage of adventures, and amidst the bugs and panicked commit messages, I definitely grew as a software developer. I’m proud of the tasks that I completed and feel incredibly grateful for my team. As for what’s next - there are always more tickets to work on and ways to flourish. Onward and upward, the sprint continues!
But wait! As a computer science student, I cannot resist sharing some metrics from this week.
1. Slack messages sent: 120
2. Most used emoji: bob-salute
3. Github contributions: 41
4. Laughs and memories made: too many to count ;)
Thanks for reading - I’ll see ya next time!
