A Day In The Life of a Senior Software Engineer at Adaptavist - Marcin Erdmann
We caught up with some of our team members to find out more about what daily life looks like for them at Adaptavist. Second up in the series, Marcin Erdmann tells us all about being a Senior Software Engineer, at our HQ in London Waterloo.
In your own words, what do you do here at Adaptavist?
At Adaptavist I'm part of the cross-functional team working on our flagship product - ScriptRunner for server applications. We have versions of ScriptRunner for Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket and I mostly work on the backend side of ScriptRunner for Jira while I'm also sometimes involved in working on platform features across all three products.
How did you come to work here?
I've been involved in the Groovy ecosystem, which is the language powering ScriptRunner's scripting capabilities, since 2010. After getting burned a number of times while working as a contractor on projects that never made it to production or having to hand them over due to my agency's contract running out, I was looking for a chance to work on something impactful and lasting where I could experience the long-term outcomes of my work. ScriptRunner definitely fits that description because it has a massive impact on the work lives of thousands of admins and millions of users of Atlassian applications.
Another reason for joining the ScriptRunner team was that I'm able to use the experience with Groovy tools and language I've amassed over the years. I believe that it makes me very productive and I find it cool to be able to get your hands dirty with the more low-level features of the language like Abstract Syntax Tree transformations or compiler customisers.
Photo by Micaela Karina
Tell me about a day in the life of a Senior Software Engineer?
Our day usually starts with a morning standup and then involves writing production code, tests, and debugging. We have a policy of preventing direct pushes to master unless the code is reviewed so it also involves reviewing other people's pull requests and addressing comments others make on pull requests I author. Apart from that, I would also be involved in conversations around technical design choices, architecture, tech debt and refactoring as well as planning stories and fleshing out acceptance criteria on more technical cards.
Somewhat more specific to me, as I'm responsible for technical screening of candidates for our team, I would have a look through CV submissions, technical test submissions and attend face to face interviews. Every two weeks, I participate in agile ceremonies like planning, demoing the work delivered in the previous sprint and retrospective meetings. Oh, and let's not forget about drinking coffee. A lot of coffee.
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
The coolest project I've worked on recently was collaborating on setting up testing infrastructure for automated verification of scripts in Adaptavist Library. I personally have a great interest in developer tooling, so it was very rewarding for me to be able to work on creating an efficient and easy way of testing scripts which allows us to be confident about their quality. The project involved hooking together technologies such as Spock, Docker, Arquillian and Gradle, including Gradle build cache that I've not had a chance to use previously.
What’s the best thing about working for Adaptavist?
The best thing about working at Adaptavist is that the atmosphere is relaxed and fun while you get to work with smart people on things that matter. There are plenty of opportunities to learn and leave one's comfort zone if that is something that you find appealing. From a developer's point of view, it is also great that the teams here are given autonomy with regard to technical choices yet nobody abuses it by, for example, selecting technologies that would look good on a CV but are not the right tool for the job. Finally, we're not working to arbitrary deadlines but we instead prioritise tasks together and we always work on what is deemed to have the highest priority at any given point in time.
What’s your biggest achievement so far?
I think the biggest achievement since starting for me is fixing a number of low-level, complex classloading issues we had when I joined and for which the team could not find long term, complete solutions beforehand.
Tell us something about you that no-one else would know already…
I'm seriously into cycling and it's great to be part of a company where many people commute to work on their bikes. We sometimes even go for rides together - last year a group of us rode the Coast to Coast (C2C) route which involves getting from west to east coast in the north of England.
Interested in becoming part of the Adaptavist team? Check out our openings on the careers page:
