Hello all! My name is Ben Lafferty and I am one of the many Pinterns this year from Telluride, Colorado. This summer I got the opportunity to learn what it is like to be a software developer at Rover.com. Rover is a website that provides dog owners with sitters. Everything from walks, to a place for your dog to spend a week when you are on vacation. They are a super cool company and I was ecstatic to be able to work with them for 2 weeks.
Monday
My first day I drove down and was greeted by Jean, who is the engineering manager for the team that I was going to be working with. When I got to the offices, I had to get a temporary badge for the day, and then I was instantly taken into a meeting. This meeting I later learned to be called “Stand Up”, and it is a short meeting where people discuss what they had done the day before, and what they are going to be working on for the coming day. After stand up, I was given a tour by Alan, who is a frontend developer at Rover. A frontend developer is someone who works on what the user sees when they visit a website. He showed me around all the different departments, and where all the different teams were located and what they did. All the engineering teams at Rover are named after different dog breeds. HR is “the people team” for obvious reasons. I learned that the team I was going to be primarily working with is called the Malamutes. After the tour, I shadowed Alan to learn what he is working on. We had a great discussion about what he was doing at the time and what his job is overall at Rover. Then it was time for lunch. The Malamutes and I went out to a restaurant not far from the Rover offices, and I got a general overview of who everyone on the team was and what their specific role is at Rover. I learned that there are a bunch of new hires at Rover because of the rate that they are currently expanding. I then had the unique opportunity to be in a job interview to see what a step of the hiring process is like. I did some more shadowing of Alan, and that was the end of my first day.
Tuesday
I got to the offices on Tuesday and went straight into stand up. Next, there was sprint planning. Rover works in 2 week sprints meaning they have a set amount of work that they would like to complete in those two weeks. Sometimes other work is added or removed midway through. The end of the last sprint was Monday, so we went over the work that was completed over the last sprint, as well as planning work that was going to need to get done over the next sprint. After sprint planning, we went into a meeting called “Sprint Preview”. Sprint preview is a meeting with all of the engineering teams, not just the Malamutes. It is a general overview of what everyone was doing the past sprint, and what everyone is going to be doing in the coming sprint. I met a bunch of new people that I had not gotten to meet previously because of the way that the teams, and the office is structured. Speaking about the office, there are dogs everywhere! After sprint preview I had lunch with Chris Anderson. Chris is a Pintern from a long time ago, and now has been working at rover for the past few years. It was super interesting to catch up with him and learn about his path from being a Pintern to now working at Rover. He is who Sarah got in contact with and who was able to get me this awesome opportunity, so I am super grateful to him. He also showed me a super sweet lunch spot! After lunch I had a debrief about the guy who was interviewed yesterday. Everyone who was a step of the interview process went over his strengths and weaknesses and decided if he was going to be a good fit at Rover. I then did some pairing with Alex and Claudia who are developers working in the same team that I am. Claudia does mostly frontend work and Alex does a combination of frontend and backend. Backend is all the stuff that happens behind the scenes, like getting data from databases that can be displayed to the user and so on. I took the water taxi home and that was the end of day 2.
Wednesday
Wednesday started with stand up, where we discussed more about the sprint and who is going to be tackling what. I did some follow up pairing with Alex and Claudia to continue to see what they are working on to get a better feel for what a developer is doing from day to day. Next up was “Backend Lunch”. Backend lunch is where a bunch of the backend developers from different teams come together and watch a video or discuss backend technologies. My main goal was to just go to as many events, meetings, and lunches with other developers to learn about what everyone is doing. After lunch I spent the entire afternoon with Lonnon. Lonnon is a backend developer and has been a developer for over 20 years. Spending the entire afternoon with him was awesome. He worked at Microsoft and helped with the launch of the Xbox, as well as a bunch of other cool companies. For the rest of the afternoon until I left, we went back and forth trying to fix a super tricky bug.
Thursday
Thursday started with stand up again, like every day does. I spent the first few hours of my morning pairing with Claudia and Alex again, just continuing to learn. I then spent some time with Staci. Staci is a backend developer and she was writing tests when I was shadowing her. In software development, you write code but then it is best practice to write tests for the code you had just written. The reason for doing this is to make sure that everything runs as you expect it to run, and if it doesn’t the test fails. This is also super helpful because when you add a new feature or fix a bug in the future, it could have unintended side effects that break previous code. But if everything is covered by tests, you will know almost immediately if something broke, and more importantly, what broke. This is super helpful because Rover’s application is massive so it can take a very long amount of time to find the issue you are trying to fix, and that can be bad. Some of the developers here say that sometime the hardest part about fixing a bug is finding it. I then got lunch at a local place and then it was time for estimation. Estimation is where we go through a bunch of “tickets” and give them points based on how hard the team thinks that they are. Tickets are basically just tasks that need to be done. For example, “Add button to form” or “Fix this bug” etc etc. Some tickets are much more difficult and some take multiple people, and then they get a certain point score that will count to the maximum that you want in a sprint. Say you wanted to try to complete 80 points worth of tickets in a sprint, you would assign enough tickets that have a combined amount of points to get to that goal. A bit confusing, but it makes keeping track of what people are doing and the priority of what needs to be done in order. I then spent the rest of that afternoon pairing with developers in the office.
Friday
There was a corporate event on Friday that I was not allowed to go to so I took the day instead to just try to gain better knowledge about a lot of the technologies that I had learned over the previous 4 days so that I could better understand them next week. There was a ton of information that I took in over those 4 days and I am excited for what next week brings!
I loved my first week at Rover. Everyone is so friendly and willing to explain what they are doing and I even got to give some feedback that helped further investigate a bug. The entire work environment is amazing and I learned an incredible amount in a short amount of time. Having dogs around the office at all times is amazing and I will make sure to take pictures of them for my blog next week! (Going to take more pictures in general. I was learning so much I totally forgot!) I can’t wait for next week to continue learning and am so grateful to Rover and Pinhead for this incredible opportunity.
The place that I work. Notice the dog pens around everyone so that if you own a dog, you can bring them in and they can stay at your feet while you are at the computer. Everyone is super chill and its a great environment to be in all day!
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