Day in the Life of a Microsoft Software Engineer | WFH

my work routine hasn't changed that much in the last four years the big career change for me was moving from Mexico to work for Microsoft but while the big ticket items remain the same some things still change I've switched teams a couple times a pandemic reshaped how people work and AI is kind of taking over so because of those things I want to share with you what a regular day in my life looks like when I'm working from home it's just over 7:30 a.m. here which is around half an hour earlier than when I usually wake up but I'm recording today so I need a bit of extra time if I still want to get my coding time in not in small part because creative me wanted to make this one cinematic let's go I wish I could tell you that I start my days feeling fresh and ready ready to go but the reality is that I struggle quite a bit with sleep so naturally mornings tend to be a bit slow for me [Music] [Music] I'm really thankful that I don't have any meetings before 10:00 a.m. it just allows me to ease a bit into my day by getting some breakfast coffee and sitting down to watch some YouTube as I ramp up with emails and teams messages [Music] [Music] I'm working on a weird bug right now where sometimes depending on the specific parameters and encoding of a URL one of our dependencies fails to parse and open it and since URLs can come from anywhere and get Modified by anyone we want to be able to handle that a bit better in addition to that I'm working on a refactor for one of our major components to hopefully cut down significantly the number of code paths it can take at run time and therefore use the potential surface area for bugs down the line but first I have stand [Music] up I like my job not every day of course but as long as there's more good days than bad days and you think you're getting well compensated for your time and impact a job in Tech can really provide a good platform for you to live life and pursue your interests this very YouTube channel is possible because of the work life balance I get with my job and and a paycheck that allows me to invest a bit on it and that in my opinion is the ultimate benefit of working in tech tech isn't the only way to achieve that balance but it's the one I know and it's the one I'm hoping I can help out others accomplish if they want to I'm kind of done with the bug I think um I still have to test a couple scenarios but things are looking a bit better my girlfriend AEL lives right across the street and we sometimes eat lunch together if she also stays home so I'm headed there right now and she knows I'm bringing the camera so I'll be taking you with me [Music] I don't really cook if I'm alone but she does like it so I don't really mind when we do it together it's actually fun and I enjoy eating a homemade meal when I can most days if I go to the office I just eat in one of Microsoft's cafeterias it's not free but it's cheap enough for me to opt into that today however we're making creamy poblano chicken I of course need something sweet afterwards fortunately I don't really have any other recurring meetings on Monday so sometimes we'll just sit down and work together for a bit I have a weird relationship with code and iPhone apps on one hand I have been working for many years with Swift and I now have strong opinions about how iPhone apps should be buil and how they should look and feel and on the other I believe in moving fast getting things done and putting them out there into the world early and it's hard to satisfy both of these constraints at the same time so I find myself needing to very intentionally turn on and off these identities depending on what the team needs are at any given time it's 300 p.m. and she did have a meeting so I headed back home and I'm working on that refactor now so I could actually use the extra monitor I have in my desk so yeah to work on that today though I do get to wear my Craftsman hat so I'm excited but for that I do need my desk's larger monitor I usually avoid using it because it's this SP that I use for things like writing editing and working on side projects so I try not to mix it with my day job if I can't avoid it I think that's enough for today it's a big refactor so I didn't really expect to get it all done today but I did get some good progress to share tomorrow and to start getting some feedback I'll go ahead and exercise for a bit shower and then we'll work on some of the side projects that I have kind of in the back burner so yeah [Music] this building actually has a nice gym I could use but it's always packed and it only has one barbell rack and two benches so it it was always a bit of an annoying experience to go down and use cardio room tends to be okay though so I do use a treadmill in there every once in a while um but yeah for everything else it's home gym for me other than YouTube stuff I've been lately putting a lot of effort into learning to code with AI and I mean integrating AI into software as a self-contained experiment I'm building a little assistant service that integrates with things like YouTube notion wab and draw Bugs to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks that I need to do both for YouTube and my daily life not a lot to show yet but it's really fun to make and I'm learning a lot about large language models and Azure if you're curious I'm using a framework developed by Microsoft called semantic kernel and it's really fun to build with it if you'd be interested in a closer look at what I'm building let me know in the comments below and I'll be happy to make one usually at this point in the day I would have a small bowl of homemade popcorn or a bit of hule um but my brother's on call and he's been really stressed and not eating so he needed something a bit more substantial and we ordered a bit of Pokey so I just kind of tagged along [Applause] [Music] my days working from home are generally a bit more relaxed and I enjoy that every now and then it's an opportunity to work while also getting in some house chores decompressed from a busy social weekend and really just ease into the work week other than Mondays and sometimes Fridays I usually do work from my office which is just a 20-minute walk away to start unwinding I'll sometimes just write for 30 minutes or so using this super cool pomodora hourglass and then really just start getting ready for bed to try and help with my sleep struggles I've lately been trying to stop all screens 1 hour before my actual bedtime and reduce all light exposure in general thank you so much for sticking around with me today I had a lot of fun recording this if you enjoyed consider liking the video below and subscribing for more but for now I need some sleep thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Juan Carlos Fontecha

Views: 18,236

Keywords: softwareengineer, bigtech, techlifestyle

Id: hH21x2Hym04

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2024