In this blog Rockborne consultant Josephine Kusi-Nimarko takes us through what a typical day looks like on our program.
I’ve been at Rockborne for over 6 weeks now and wow has the time flown by. It took a couple of weeks to get out of my university routine but now I’m fully settled. In this blog, I’m going to give you a peek at what a typical day is like for me.
6 am
I am awoken by my screeching alarm before I stagger around disorientated for a few minutes looking for my phone. After I catch up on the memes from Love Island last night, I kick off my day with a shower that somehow always overruns.
7 am
I take my last few sips of green tea and head out the door. The summer holidays have started so I can get a seat on the tram for once. I spent most of my journey to Wimbledon people watching and catching up with my friends. When the train’s a bit quieter, I end up reading or watching some training videos from the previous day.
8.15 am
I get to the office early and make myself a huge cup of coffee, which is the important part of my day, to be honest. I start chatting away to all the fellow early birds in the cohort, most of whom are now obsessed with the Nuffield gym nearby.
8.45 am
Everyone’s buzzing in the office as the weekend is just around the corner. Waseem starts off our day with a stand-up, which usually ends in us all debating the most random things and today was no different. We discussed whether Greggs was overrated and some of my peers surely had to be sponsored by them because they sure were passionate. Apart from the random debates, the stand-ups are beneficial as they set the tone for the day and give a quick overview of what’s coming up in the day/week; we learn Agile as part of our training, so having this principal of stand ups / daily outcomes, and deliverables is super useful. It’s also the best time to ask any questions you have whether big or small.
9 am
Now it’s work time. We all head back to our seats and get ready to continue with some web scraping from yesterday using Beautiful Soup. We have Jupyter notebooks filled with exercises to help solidify our learning. One of the tasks involved making a dictionary comprised of all the tagged articles on a BBC news page with their associated URLs. My favourite thing about Beautiful Soup apart from its name is that it has helped me to understand HTML structure.
10 am
We had another amazing guest speaker, Indranil Nath came to talk to us about how AI and ML impact D&I and there were definitely a few jaw-dropping moments, to say the least. His talk got all of us thinking about what we can and will do as Data Engineers to prevent our unconscious biases from influencing our decisions; what an inspiring conversation this was, and I’m really grateful that we get the opportunity to speak to external guests such as Indranil. We have had a really stellar lineup of speakers in the cohort so far.
1 pm
Now it’s time for my favourite part of the day, lunchtime. I am the leftover queen, so I had some rice and chicken. Everyone loves to gather around the dining table and enjoy lunch together; a great way to bond and integrate as a team, what’s even better is Waseem and the Partners join us too.
4 pm
The last couple hours of the day are dedicated to independent study so we consolidate our learning from the day. I used the time to go through the jupyter notebooks with questions on For and While loops. While loops execute the command argument for as long as the conditions are true. Whereas For loops iterate over each item in a list, dictionary, tuple, set or string. Whenever I got a bug in my script there was always someone in the cohort willing to guide me through it. This emphasises what Waseem and the Partners said on day 1, apart from what is taught by the trainers, we learn so much from each other.
6 pm
Time to pack my whole life back into my Rockborne backpack and head home. On my journey home I like to reflect on what I’ve learnt during the day. The most interesting thing I learnt was how useful the inspect tool in google chrome is for mastering HTML structure.
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