Working Life Blog

A Mantra For Personal Growth.

Carme Mias – Software Developer

My name is Carme Mias, and I’m a software developer in Aridhia’s Analytics Tooling team. The Analytics Tooling team is a small, well-coordinated team that works closely with the main platform developers and Data Science teams, as well as the Quality Control, Ops and Service Desk teams. Our main task is to either build or adapt for use within the DRE the data analysis and coding tools that our customers need to do their job.

For this, we use a wide range of languages and tools, the main ones being Ruby, JavaScript, React, R, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure cloud, PostgreSQL, and bash scripting. Our day-to-day work is really varied!

For many roles at Aridhia, provided we are there for the core hours of 10am to 4pm, our working day is flexible. I am a morning person, so I do like to start early, but many others are the complete opposite! In any case, come 10:05am my team will be at the daily stand up with the platform developers where we update each other on what we are all working on and arrange to collaborate or discuss further any topics that come up. After that, we go off to work on our various jobs and tickets.

However, this does not mean that we spend all day on our isolated silos. Since we started working from home back in March 2020, we have been trying different ways to replicate what was good about working from the same room: from an all-day Open Mic with the whole team to pair programming with senior developers on harder issues, as well as the more social coffee mornings, quizzes, lunchtime languages sessions and games. Slack and Teams have now become even more vital than they ever were before. Of course, now that restrictions are easing, we are also looking forward to meeting again for social get-togethers!

Once a month, there is a team retrospective that helps us gain awareness of everyone’s viewpoints as well as refine and improve what we think works well and review what hasn’t. This keeps us focused on a cycle of continuous improvement.

Another thing that has not just continued strongly, but grown, has been knowledge sharing within the company. One of the regular features is a monthly internal ‘tech meetup’ where any developer who wishes to do so can share something interesting or new they’ve worked on or learned. This is pretty handy for practicing your public speaking skills as well! Other initiatives include a company-wide security workshop organised by one of the senior developers, and an internal talk by one of the leading NHS data scientists organised by one of the project managers. And if what we want to learn is not something we already use, we all have our own personal learning budget to use each year on courses or conferences.

Learn, support, reflect, review, and improve: five words that could describe the Agile methodology Aridhia embraces. They have also become a mantra that helps me drive my personal growth.