Welcome back to our Intuiteam Day in the Life series where we take a look into what a typical day at work is like for our Intuiteam talents! Today’s feature is on Marco Sumali, a Software Engineer currently working at GovTech on the Virtual Intelligent Chat Assistant (VICA) team. For his nine months stint in VICA, Marco’s job is to leverage natural language processing engines and artificial intelligence to improve virtual and phone interactions that citizens and businesses have with Singapore government agencies.
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08:00am It’s time to wake up and get ready to head to work! I rarely have breakfast but when I do, I usually have an onigiri or sandwich from 7-11 which I buy the night before.
08:30am I usually commute to the GovTech office which is at the Mapletree Business City via MRT. At VICA, we usually do daily stand ups online on one of our Slack channels. On the channel, we communicate to each other about our daily tasks and inform the team about any blockers that we might need help with. I usually summarize my daily tasks and blockers during the commute to office.
09:15am I reach the office, greet my co-workers and start on my daily tasks. At VICA, we usually manage our workload using sprint systems. Each sprint lasts for two weeks and engineers will take on different assignments based on their capabilities, how much time they have chosen to commit to that sprint, and task priorities set by the product manager For the current sprint, I am in charge of building a live chat feature where citizens and businesses can request a live chat session with Government agencies through the VICA chatbot.
10:00am During this time, we usually have a team meeting where each team member will update their progress to the rest of the team for high level goals that we have agreed to for the current sprint. The team will then provide feedback or comments.
11:00am After today’s team meeting, I have a quick discussion with the DevOps team regarding some network bugs that our agencies are facing. I then do some Lighthouse tests to ensure that we solve the bugs.
12:00pm It’s lunch time! We usually have lunch together as a team since we rarely see each other and we often eat somewhere near Alexandra Retail Centre. Usually by 12pm there are already long queues at all the good food spots so we need to be patient. Once we get lunch, we take the time to catch up with each other and share about what’s happening with our lives. It’s a good break in the middle of the day and we can just forget about work for a while.
2:00pm Lunch is over and we’re back to work, starting off with a Special Request meeting! During this meeting, the project team usually presents the list of special requests from our agencies. The team then discusses the estimated effort of each special request and aligns it with our product road map.
4:00pm It’s finally time for our last and most fun meeting of the day: the UI/UX meeting. In this meeting, the UI/UX team presents a list of new designs for the stories on our product roadmap and each team member provides feedback. If there are multiple design options, we conduct a quick voting session. Once the meeting is over, I continue to work on my daily tasks.
6:00pm It’s the end of the work day and we finish it with some game time! We’ve worked hard for the day and we unwind by playing some games together. In the office, we have a few game options on our floor such as foosball, darts, table tennis, and even a Nintendo Switch. I usually play for fun and sometimes I take the chance to get some exercise to burn fat. Some of the team members are really competitive though, especially when we play table tennis. They may or may not show mercy during this “happy hour”.
And that’s a day in the life of another Intuiteam Software Engineer with different, yet still exciting experience! Interested in undertaking exciting opportunities and embarking on new experiences with 2359 Media? Email your CV to us at talent@2359media.com today!
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