A day in the life of a Technical Lead at Aire Logic
We interviewed Michael to see what a normal working day involves as a Technical Lead
How do you get ready to start your day?
Mostly the start of my day begins the night before. I like to ensure I have as clear a desk as possible, so I spend a few minutes at the end of my day making sure my workspace is clear and ready for a good start.
When my alarm rings, and I’ve snoozed a suitable number of times. I like to do a relatively gentle 15 minutes on the rowing machine to get the blood pumping before I grab a quick shower. Once I’ve got myself moving, I like a light breakfast and ideally a coffee, although sometimes that ends up being a red bull instead.
I sit down at my desk just before 9am and pick up updates on the various communication platforms we use that might be relevant before my morning stand-up meeting begins at 9.30am.
What is a typical working day like?
There is no such thing as a typical working day for me. Some days are back-to-back meetings helping design and implement new features or diagnosing and performing root cause analysis of issues and failures. On other days I get some time to explore and assess
technologies that might apply to upcoming work and do some prototyping to try and give the team a head-start when they get onto the related work. I rarely finish a day how I expected it to when it started.
What are you most looking forward to getting involved with?
The ongoing work at the Christie has become business as usual for me after over two years on the project. I’m unsure what other challenges await me if/when I eventually move to another project or workstream. I always look forward to improving the developer experience and process on any project.
What is the most challenging part of your job?
The authors of ‘Peopleware’ summed it up very well for me when they wrote, “The business we’re in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.” I like to paraphrase that “development is more of a sociological problem than technological.”
The most challenging aspects of my job are always dealing with people one way or another, whether it is ensuring that a team of developers share a vision for the system they are working on or it’s explaining to a group of users why the system behaves a particular way using language that doesn’t intimidate or otherwise put them off interacting with the development team. The difficulty always revolves around the human aspects of the process.
How do you like to unwind after work?
Most evenings, I spend some time cooking dinner. I like being creative and find cooking one of the most immediately rewarding ways to create something, contrasting with development tasks.
After dinner, my partner and I will watch some TV. We’re both into sci-fi and fantasy, so we’re usually partway through some re-watch of a Star Trek series or something like Fringe. Or we’ll explore new movies. I tend to retire to my little home studio, where I play and record mainly electronic instruments. I’m currently working on a spatial audio performance where the sound from each of my instruments can be moved around in a 3D space to be played on a Dolby Atmos or similar stage.
