My first day at Pivotal NYC.
Very exciting to be joining the Engineering team at Pivotal Labs NYC.
It’s quite amazing to see the scale of the projects they are involved with and the way in which their three primary divisions (big data analysis, extreme programming labs and cloud computing infrastructure) work together.
Here’s a typical first day.
8:30am Breakfast (with everyone)
Monday morning. Arriving to a crew of talented engineers over a delicious buffet breakfast. Chats. Sunrise.
Over breakfast we made plans to order in a new cello and violin to add to the piano and various other instruments in our breakout space.
It’s eye opening to see the floor get together and go around internal news and events. An opportunity to find out about interesting social and meetup type events that are on throughout the day.
9:30am Project team stand up
Pivotal NYC is a crew of ~200 talented engineers, designers and product mangers with an amazing outlook on what it means to build software the “right way”.
I should be so lucky.
10am Organisation overview
Finding out more about the impact Pivotal is having on the industry explained a lot about how and why they have had so much success these past few years.
When you look at the scale of what Pivotal does it highlights how the modern business landscape is dramatically changing.
12pm Buddy lunch
Local delicacies. Swag. Chats.
2pm Project Overview & Pairing
New technologies. A gorgeous new stack. Java, React, Ruby, TDD.
I was lucky enough to hit the ground running with Moshe. He has some reasonably firm opinions on how to best write JavaScript. Nice!
One striking thing about writing code at Pivotal is that each line of code is written by two pairs of eyes at any given time. Pair programming. Extreme programming. It’s a new experience for me but it really does dial up the common sense quality of what we are building.
A healthy number of ping pong breaks.
6pm Home time
Empathy. Energy. Creativity. Communication. Feedback.
“Life comes first. Work comes second. We get that life is a balance and we do everything we can to make sure you succeed.”
