A Day In The Life of A Pivotal Engineer

Hi, my name is Oleksandr. I work at Pivotal in Dublin on Cloud Foundry. I will describe my typical day on the project Eirini. Project Eirini allows connecting the different container orchestrators to Cloud Foundry. We focus on Kubernetes. We have done the minimum work and now focusing on performance and security.

My day starts in Dart.

I use the ten minutes to quickly filter my email and Slack messages. I archive boring ones and add reminders to things I want to answer or read through later. I don’t have too much time to read on the train. Sometimes, I just read a book.

I come to the office at about 9 am. I get breakfast and get ready for the standup. At 9:06 we have the office standup.

Usually, I have 15 more minutes before the team stand up. I do follow-ups and finish sorting my Slack and emails. If I don’t check the email by that time, I most probably won’t check it at all.

At 9:30 we have a team standup.

We have a cross-company, cross-country standup. We have engineers from IBM, SAP and Pivotal working on Eirini. Interestingly enough, I’ve been working for most of my time in Pivotal on cross-company projects. I have been working for the last three years with people from different companies. I also worked in remote teams all the time. My only non-remote experience was during my first three months which I spend outside of Dublin. I like it. It lets me work from home. During the last six months, I have been working three days from home. 

After the standup, we grab a story to work on. When I work from the office, I try to pair locally. Today I pair with Akshay on scale testing. We have already run initial scale tests and found out the issue in routing. It has been fixed and we have deployed a new cluster and started the load testing. I got greedy and decided to deploy 4000 applications by chunks of 100 applications. It broke everything. We run out of limits, we overloaded CAPI, Diego cells and Loggregator, but Eirini was up and running. All the applications were servable.

I got a break at 11 and we had a game of foosball.

We got lunch at 12:30 and continue working at 13:30.

At 14:00 I have a biweekly 1–1 meeting with my manager.

The rest of the day we keep working on Eirini. Eventually, we have deployed the applications and we will proceed with tests tomorrow.

It is 5:00. Time to go. We have a flex hour policy. This means I can spend one hour on work-related things outside of regular working hours.

About the Author

Oleksandr Slynko is a Software Engineer at Pivotal.