A Day in the Dev Life
Written By: Jordan Casanova
If you’ve ever wondered what a day in the life of a technical consultant looks like, this blog is for you! Coffee is a must before I start the morning. I am on a small project team that mostly oversees itself, so my schedule is lighter on meetings than most other projects. Usually, time spent in meetings varies from project to project. Larger teams often start their mornings with standup, a brief meeting meant to be held in the amount of time you would be comfortable physically standing and sharing brief updates about your workload and status. Questions such as “What did you complete the day before?”, “What are you stuck on?”, “What do you plan to work on for that day?”, “What might you need help with?” are all fair game. However, standup is not strictly business. These meetings also serve to build team camaraderie. On my former project, where I worked with five srcLogic team members and multiple clients, we would end standup with a jeopardy question of the day. I love this aspect of the job. Meetings never feel too stiff when they involve our srcLogic team!
My situation is quite different now. I am the only srcLogic developer on my team, and the only person with knowledge implementing the Pega Platform. My team lead is a custom-code developer and she had never been introduced to our low-code platform, Pega, prior to this project. She and one other developer had built the previous solution using .NET and SharePoint. This is a fairly common situation in which we are modernizing an app that was built with far less customizable and maintainable tools than Pega. Being the main decision-maker with less than two years of experience on a high-impact application offers significant challenges. While I am the lone srcLogic developer staffed on the project, I have all the technical support I need from other srcLogic experts. Thanks to our company’s collaborative nature, it’s really as if you get the whole srcLogic team rather than just those on the contract.
So, while my day may lack formal meetings, it is made up for with informal teaching sessions. This is a great trade. Pega is complex software and traditional custom-code developers may feel like they are learning to program all over again. While I get frustrated from time to time, I also find myself loving what the Pega Platform provides in ease of use. My current client has a requirement for electronic signature capability. Pega offers a pre-built integration with DocuSign. However, nobody in the company has ever leveraged the integration, so I am in unchartered territory. I have spent many weeks working through this. The client has very specific requirements for the e-signature capability, which results in a lot of time spent on tailoring the integration exactly to the client’s needs.
It is an iterative process to get the client exactly what they want. Integrating multiple technologies always has unforeseen challenges that force us as developers to engage with both the business and product support to deliver a seamless experience to the user. This back and forth can be time-consuming, but forces us to be constantly engaged, making the days fly by.