Matthew Moss

8:50 AM

I leave home and start my day by walking into work. I live about a 25-minute walk from our office at Darling Park, including a stop at my favourite café for my morning coffee along the way. I find it a great way to start my day and love that I don’t have to worry about crowded public transport.

9:15 AM

I get into work around 9:15am and head up to level 5 to my team area. Our Sydney office practices activity-based working, so we don’t have assigned desks and I can sit next to whoever I need to be working with that day. Today I’m working on a feature with one of the other iOS developers, so I put my bag in my locker, get out my laptop and pull up a chair at the desk next to him. I spend a bit of time checking my calendar and remembering where I left off yesterday while having a chat with my team.

9:30 AM

My team has a stand up meeting every day at 9:30am where we share what we worked on yesterday, what we will be doing today and if we need help from anyone to do this. This is great for keeping the team aligned to our goals for the current sprint and a nice way to start the working day. My team has 12 members but IAG promotes flexible working, so some of my team are working from home today and we have a smaller group for stand up. My update for today was that I finished updating some screens on the app with a new design created by our UI designer and I will be starting to work on the new accessibility features.

9:45 AM

Stand up finishes and I have a good idea of what I’m going to be doing today so I head back to my desk and fire up XCode, which is the program used for building iOS apps. I don’t usually have many meetings on a typical day, and my morning is completely free until 11:30am. I hadn’t done any mobile app development before starting at IAG, so working on the accessibility features will mean doing a bit of research as I go. I get straight into it and make a lot of progress in this solid block of time I have.

11:15 AM

I’m feeling like a bit of a break after that chunk of work, so I message the graduate group on Slack and see if anyone wants to have a quick coffee break on level 10. This is the level where we have the main kitchen and coffee machines and large tables to sit around. Our office has a great internal staircase, so I walk up to level 10 and make myself a coffee. We sit down at one of the round tables and have a chat about our plans for what we are going to do after work tonight because it's Friday!

11:30 AM

I have a catch-up meeting with my manager and discuss what I worked on at our hackathon I participated in last week. The Digital division at IAG regularly hosts these to encourage people to develop things outside of their normal work, collaborate with people in other teams and learn new skills. My team for the hackathon built a web application using the React JavaScript framework that could be used to help developers collaborate across teams. I had been wanting to improve my web development skills, so this was the perfect opportunity. We also discuss what team I am interested in joining for my next rotation, starting in 2 months.

12:00 PM

After my meeting, I decided to head up for lunch so I grab my lunch out of the fridge and head up to level 10 again. I heat up my food and sit down at the table that a big group of the graduate cohort sit at every day. It is nice to catch up with everyone and is the part of the day I always look forward to! I moved here from Brisbane to start this job without knowing anybody in Sydney so I am really thankful that the group of graduates all get along really well.

12:30 PM

I get back to my desk and talk to the other developer I’m working with today and he mentions he found a new framework he wants to implement into the app. I have never worked with it before, so I do some research and find some great tutorials to do. I feel like a change of scenery so I pick up my laptop and head over to a table next to the window for some learning with a view.

2:00 PM

We have a team elaboration where we go through a new feature we are planning on building, lead by the Business Analyst in our team. This allows the whole team to be on the same page about what is technically possible to build and everything that should be included. We have a team member from one of our customer contact centres who joins us once a week as a Subject Matter Expert and gives us great insights and helps us understand how to build our apps to give the best experience for our customers. Once we are happy with how the requirements are looking, we finalise them and I head back to a regular desk again.

3:00 PM

I plug my laptop in and get back to work. I have a good understanding of how to build this feature and the rest of my day is free so I put my headphones on, put on some music and get into focus mode. The accessibility features need to be tested as I develop them, so I have a couple of test devices in front of me and am constantly going between coding and testing. I’m really enjoying building this feature because I can see how it is going to really help our customers who are vision impaired or require the use of external input devices to use their phones or tablets. It is very rewarding, and I feel that it really aligns with IAG’s purpose of making your world a safer place.

4:00 PM

I head to the kitchen on my level and make myself a tea. While there, I have a little chat with someone I know from another team and then head back to my desk. I have been sitting for a while so I raise my standing desk and get back to work developing the app. I check with the UX person in our team to ensure the functionality I built works as she expects. I also go and see how the Android developers are going with building the same feature. We develop and release everything in parallel on both platforms to ensure a consistent experience for our customers. It is getting towards the end of the day and I’m happy with how things are looking, so I push my changes that I made to the app.

5:15 PM

I pack my desk up and grab my backpack from my locker. I go down to meet the other grads for a couple of drinks and dinner, which has become a weekly Friday ritual. Afterwards, I walk home and my weekend begins!