POV - You’re a Software Engineer at Stack Builders, Spain (Part 2)

My daily routine:

Here in Spain we are currently a 100% remote team, although about every month or two the Madrid-based people get together in a coworking space (sometimes with a visitor from our Ecuador team 🙌🇪🇨). Here’s a sneak peek of what my day looks like:

• 9:30 - 10:00: I wake up and go to the kitchen to prepare my mandatory morning coffee, and get a glass of juice or some blueberries while I catch up with my message inbox before I start working.
• 10:00-14:00: My workday starts. This is the time frame in which I do asynchronous work, due to the time difference between Spain and the Ecuador team or the clients (US based).
• 14:00-15:00: Usually lunch time 🍽.
• 15:00-19:00: During these hours is when I tend to have most meetings with my team colleagues from Ecuador and with the team from the client project on which I'm currently working. The daily stand-up, a weekly 1-on-1 with my manager to discuss my professional development, or the "Company Announcements" meeting we have weekly for all people at Stack Builders are some examples of the meetings I have. I don't usually have many meetings, so in those hours I also get work done and it's the perfect time to ask all the questions that might have come up during the morning. I also plan the work I'll be doing the next morning when the rest of the team is offline.
• 19:00-: I close my laptop and I’m off to enjoy the rest of the day 🎮🍻

Going beyond coding

Besides what I've already said, we also do community work and Open Source development. We prepare talks for conferences, host events, write tutorials and blog posts (like this one!), maintain Open Source projects developed in-house, and contribute to well-established existing projects. I've had the opportunity to make several contributions to our repositories (and I'm currently a maintainer for one of them) and give a presentation introducing functional programming at an event we hosted in Madrid in June 2022 (you can watch it here). I love it when I get some time to do work on stuff like this because, honestly, it's the kind of work I love the most 😄.​

We also do internal training with a broad range of topics from soft skills all the way to libraries like React and other programming languages like Haskell. A lot of effort is put into allowing people to grow professionally and personally, which shows.

My experience here at Stack Builders has been incredible so far. To feel so supported by a team so capable both at a technical level as well as on a human level is fulfilling and makes you want to give your best every day; not just with the client you happen to be working with, but also to make the company grow and to keep learning and growing on a professional and a personal level.

​I hope we keep expanding the Spain team as time goes on. If you liked what I said about Stack Builders here, I encourage you to take a look at our current job openings, apply, and get to know us better 😉