Declan Barrett

6.15 AM

I get out of bed and get dressed, ready to drive my wife to her morning Pilates class.

7.00 AM

I jump on my first bus which is right near the Pilates studio and make my usual transfer to King George Square at around 7.35 am.

8.00 AM

I get off the bus at the BOQ Office at Newstead and make my way to Woolworths to get some fruit for breakfast.

8.15 AM

I arrive at the office, and it’s time to grab a Chai Latte from the coffee machine. I usually wait until midday before getting a real coffee so I don’t have a 3.00 pm slump.

8.20 AM

I manage to secure my usual window spot on level 3 and begin to set up my laptop and monitors. Once I’m set up it’s time for a quick banana breakfast before diving into the day's work!

8.30 AM

I begin the workday by answering my morning emails. I have a few new enquiries about how my API changes will affect the load on the cloud infrastructure to my project owner about completing our test summary report (TSR). Today it looks like a few other development teams came in, so the floor is buzzing.

9.00 AM

I start up my virtual machine that I use for development and do my regular morning API test in Postman. This helps determine whether an API I am relying on is down or not. I then begin updating documentation in relation to raising a pull request for some ARM template work I completed.

9.30 AM

I jump into a soundproof office to have a sprint planning meeting. 95% of meetings are virtual since my project team is spread across Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. The project owner, scrum master, and the external vendor we are integrating with are all in attendance and which parts of the application, as well as the API integration work that I am doing for the next two weeks, are all discussed and updated in our Jira board.

10.30 AM

I realized I needed to do some further testing in relation to the pull request. I opened up my IDE of choice on my VM and added some tests so that I could test the ARM templates in my Azure DevOps Pipeline.

11.00 AM

Attended a virtual presentation on Cloud Transformation.

12.00 PM

Continued testing deployment.

12.30 PM

Lunchtime. We (Lawson & myself) decided on Subway and ate together in the dining area which looks out over the gasworks plaza courtyard.

1.15 PM

Time to grab some water from the kitchen and get back to testing the ARM templates, providing proof of testing before submitting the pull request. Comments were made to it by those in different teams and I continued to make modifications to it as the day progressed. Working at a bank involves a lot of policies and standards. As a junior engineer, your manager and team know that you are still getting used to both the technical and business aspects of the tasks you are assigned. They also allow a lot of room for you to grow, explore and learn for yourself, it’s one of the best things about working at BOQ.

4.30 PM

Every Tuesday we have a recurring meeting “Inter-Department Networking Time” aka ping pong amongst the former interns. During the internship, you are assigned a group that consists of interns from roles all over the bank. We have kept the group going long after the internship ended, and we meet up every Tuesday afternoon for ping-pong on Level 3.

5.15 PM

Ping pong ends and we all leave to go take our public transport routes home, mine being via the train in Bowen Hills.

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