As an apprentice, I split my time between attending the academy working on my certificate and coming to work at Fifteen, working on websites and other exciting projects. My course with the academy lasts up until January. By then I’ll have hopefully completed my certificate, meaning I can focus entirely on work with Fifteen.
For this “day in the life” I want to talk about a typical day at work with Fifteen. If you want to read more about my course with the academy, you can read about my first week with 3aaa.
Morning
My typical working day starts around 7:30. I’ll first have a shower, get dressed and head downstairs to have some breakfast. The breakfast routine starts with an espresso, followed by either toast or coco-pops. Sometimes I’ll treat myself to fried eggs on toast but I normally save that for my weekend breakfast.
After setting off for work at 8:30 and arriving for 8:45, the 15 minutes I have spare before the working day commences I spend chatting to everyone at work and organising myself for the day ahead.
Being an apprentice means my days don’t always follow the typical developer tasks. I’ll quite often be doing a lot of different tasks as well as helping other developers out on projects their working on. Some days, I’ll spend the whole day coding websites or building emails and other days I’ll spend testing or working on some college work at my desk.
With that being said, more recently my routine has been following the typical developers day as I have been building (and just launched) a website for a client. This means for the past couple of weeks it has been non-stop coding for me, which has been brilliant, as in this project alone I feel like I’ve learnt so much already.
However, I always start my day off, like anyone would, by scanning any emails that have come through just to ensure that any urgent tasks are made well aware of.
After this, I’ll normally carry on with any projects I was working on the day before up until the task is complete or someone asks me to do something else. Today I’ve been carrying on building an email newsletter for a client. Building the email has been a really enjoyable task as I’ve not only been practising putting my coding to use but also brushing up on my Photoshop skills. This is always useful when working in a creative environment as having a better understanding of the process your colleagues go through when they work will help you become a better member of the team.
Afternoon
When lunchtime comes around I’ll normally head out for some air by walking to Tesco with a few others. But I tend to always pack up sandwiches with me unless it’s the odd Friday where I’d probably buy a KFC.
After lunch finishes I’ll carry on with working on any projects from the morning or any other tasks that get passed onto me. Sometimes when I get the time spare I like to do some internal learning. While most of the time I approach this by trying out code myself by building sites and getting input from the other developers, other times I like to take courses on CodeCademy and Lynda. Courses normally last around 1-2 hours and offer a hands-on learning approach whilst packing in a lot of useful information and resources. I took an awesome course in learning GIT the other week and I’m already really confident using it.
You can learn a little more about these course providers and getting into web development in one of my previous blogs, ‘You are not alone web developers!’ .
When 5 arrives, I’ll start closing off for the day and getting my work to a point where it’ll be easy to pick up the following day. This normally involves checking over and finishing my code and preparing a checklist of tasks for the next working day.
After Work
Around 5.30 I’ll head home and probably head straight out again to either badminton or ice hockey practice depending on which day it is. I also enjoy going to the cinema and playing games. After this, I’ll have dinner with my family or at my girlfriends house and we’ll then browse Netflix. We’ve recently watched Peaky Blinders and are we’re now making our way through The Walking Dead.
Bedtime is anywhere between 00:30 and 01:30. I’m not a massive fan of sleep nor require a lot of it, just enough to get by. Most nights I get lost playing games into the early hours or watching YouTube videos which helps ease the transition of getting into bed and falling asleep.