February 21, 2025
My day starts at home with a quick glance out the window to check if it’s raining. If it is, I join the weekly planning meeting from home and head to the office only once the weather clears up. Fortunately, today the weather is great, so I leave The Hague by bike at 8:10. This way, I arrive just in time to make a cup of coffee before the meeting begins.
In the planning meeting, the entire team discusses the status of all projects from the past week and plans the projects for the upcoming week. We do this using our collection of epics in Jira, our personal time planning in Float, and, more recently, Atlas to make project goals more transparent.
The rest of the morning is spent tying up loose ends. I tackle the last remaining issues, process feedback on PRs, answer questions on Slack, and check whether both the back-end and front-end are ready for Monday’s release (because we never release on Fridays 😇).
By late Friday morning, hunger starts to kick in - a clear sign that it's almost lunchtime. We can thank Pavlov and Ladage for that, as on Fridays, Tom and Susan often treat us to a delicious lunch from Rotterdam’s most famous fry shop, Bram Ladage.
After our "brammetje", there’s still some time to order next week’s groceries from Albert Heijn and wrap up all tasks neatly, so we can start fresh with a new project on Monday.
At 4:00 PM, the final meeting of the week is on the agenda: the monthly web improvement session. In this session, we, as web developers (together with Tom and Susan), discuss everything that can make our work better, more enjoyable, easier, and more efficient. We do this by looking at new developments, relevant articles, and best practices from other disciplines.
Once the key improvements have been discussed, the Google Calendar jingle rings again—for the most important agenda item of the week: the Friday afternoon drinks! If last week's grocery order went well, there's a nice IPA waiting for me to wrap up the week with my colleagues. Cheers! 🍻
