Day in the Life of a Developer Dad

7:14 AM

• My day begins with washing the milk bottles and the utensils of our 3 year old son. We don’t have nannies so me and my wife have always shared parenting responsibilities. Open Apple Music and play The Bouncing Souls - How I Spent My Summer Vacation album.

7:45 - 8:15 AM Coffee Time & Breakfast

• Brew coffee. While waiting for coffee, catch up on emails and Twitter. There is a new Xcode beta out today.

• Add it to Things as a reminder.
• After that first sip of morning coffee, it is time to prepare ingredients. Today I will be cooking SPAM fried rice.

8:32 - 8:45 AM

• Wife just woke up and needs to go to the bathroom. I gave her SPAM fried rice for breakfast afterwards while waiting for our son to wake up.

8:46 AM - 9AM

• Minutes after our son wakes up. Our son likes to cuddle right away.

9 - 10 AM

• Me and my wife will then continue eating breakfast before proceeding to work. We love to watch YouTube together while dining, while our son is in the background playing with his toys.

10 AM

• My wife will go to her office next room, while I work at the masters bedroom with our son. This is the time I set and update my calendar.

• And check my tasks for the day using Things.

• There is a new Xcode beta release today. I will try to compile our codebase today using this latest version so I can anticipate any breaking changes.

• While wating for Xcode to finish downloading, I start reading the Xcode 13.3 Beta 3 Release Notes and check if there are any potential issues or deprecations that may affect our codebase.

• There are 3 issues that caught my eye but nothing significant.

10:49 AM

• Our toddler just pooped. Time to change diapers and clean up. Text the wife.

10:56 AM

• Resume reading the Xcode release notes. Sip coffee to stay awake.

10:57 - 11:08 AM

• Xcode 13.3 Beta 3 just finished downloading. Time to compile. Open terminal and git status to make sure there are no uncommited changes from the previous day. Switch to a new branch and compile the codebase to the latest Xcode beta.

• While waiting for Xcode to archive, copy and do its thing, I go back to reading the release notes.

11:09 - 11:30 AM

• Xcode still not done with archiving.

Time to catch up on my GitHub notifications. I followed several repositories in order stay updated on the latest releases and possibly contribute or file issues.

It seems there is a new SwiftLint update. I start reading the release notes and update using homebrew. I use SwiftLint to enforce properly Swift’s code conventions and style to our codebase.

I saw git-lfs has an update but not sure if I’m using it. I forgot the command, so Google.

Negative, no git-lfs installed. Remove remaining GitHub notifications that I am not interested.

11:24 - 12 PM

• Quick play time with our toddler while waiting for Xcode beta to unarchive and to open.

12 PM - 12:40 PM

Back to work, Xcode beta is done installing. Time to compile our codebase. At this point, the build failed.

It is the same error from the previous beta version of Xcode. Open Realm’s GitHub to check on progress since I already filed an issue before. And it seems there will be a fix on the next release. Open terminal, time to get back to develop branch.

12:40 - 12:50 PM

Open Basecamp and catch up on the company’s activity.

12:50 - 1PM

If nothing interesting happens, I will then proceed to reviewing the iOS bugs from the previous week. If I found new bugs, I will then add it to our repository’s GitHub Issues.

1 - 1:30 PM

I do the same thing with our Android app, review Android bugs from the previous week. As you can see it has more bugs compared to iOS, thing is our app still supports Android 5.0 Lollipop. Yikes!

1:30 - 3 PM

• All these bugs made me hungry. And dizzy. Grab lunch and spend time with family.

3 - 4:30 PM

• Back to work. Continue reviewing the Android bugs while listening (watching) to Kotlin by Jetbrains YouTube episode Kotlin Multiplatform at Todoist! How? Where? Why?. I’m exploring migrating parts of our codebase to KMM and this topic help me decide.

4:30 - 7:00

• Time for another break. Playtime with our kid and family time. At this point of the day I’m already sleepy, so I also make sure I grab another round of coffee.

7 - 8:15 PM

• Back to work. Open Xcode 13.2.1 and start implementing the Show Password feature in the sign in page.

8:15 - 9 PM

• Bath time with our son and after we prepare for bedtime.

9 - 10 PM

• Dinner time!

10 PM

• Bedtime for our kid. This is the time to recap today’s tasks and what to work for tomorrow.

Takeaways

I just want to point out that software development is not all about coding. It is planning milestones, documentation, debugging, collaboration, research, etc.

And, as a developer dad no two days are alike.

One more thing, as a parent I am grateful to work in a company that allows me to work flexibly and trusts me to do my work in any way or time I can.