Working at Shine

Marcela is a passionate senior software engineer who loves tech and sharing her knowledge with others.

She’s a strong communicator, a team player, and has a quick ability to learn new technologies.

Living and loving Melbourne, without losing her connection with her beloved Colombia.

Marcela loves cooking Colombian food, traveling, and learning new cultures, and tasting different street food.

Before work
Breakfast and watch news

The AM
Stand up, get into the matrix (coding)

Lunch
Quick lunch and walking around the dockside

The PM
Meetings (planning, retro, estimations, dev-guild), and more matrix

After work
Cooking, doing some exercise (Zumba or Ring Fit Adventure), reading or colouring mandalas.

Since starting with Shine in 2004 Ben has evolved from a Junior Engineer to a Senior Engineer, and now a Principal Engineer who leads teams of software engineers.

While he considers himself deeply technical, what he values most about his role at Shine is the people factor. He loves sharing his philosophy of software engineering with new new recruits and graduates, and developing engineers to achieve their greatest potential.

Ben describes a typical day for a Shine Senior Engineer as…

You arrive at work, just in time for the daily stand-up meeting. Once back at your desk, you check your inbox and review a couple of PRs raised the day before, popping some comments on one and approving the other. Then you pick the next card off the backlog and have a chat with the client BA to clarify some details about it.

Although you’re a React specialist and the task itself is mostly front-end work, in Sprint Planning it was identified that some infrastructure changes would be required as well. Consequently, you grab a team member who specialises in AWS and have an impromptu whiteboard session to make sure you’re clear about how this feature will hang together across the stack. You decide to have a crack at making the infrastructure changes yourself, knowing that you can always reach out to them if you need help.

After lunch you’re about to settle in to start work on the feature when a rather stressed-out client Delivery Manager approaches you about an issue that has come up with a system you both worked on six months ago. Although strictly speaking you aren’t working on that project anymore, you take a quick look anyway. You identify the right person for the Delivery Manager to talk to next, and they head off a little less flustered than when they arrived.

You’re able to make good progress on the new feature that afternoon, although you check in on your email and Slack every hour or so to help move along people’s PRs, and see if anybody needs any quick assistance with anything. On the #front-end-guild channel you learn there will be a guild meeting back at Shine HQ next week, with some interesting-sounding talks.

Things have quietened down, so for the last hour of the day you enjoy a period of uninterrupted focus. You head home looking forward to picking up where you left off tomorrow.

Trudi’s background is in software engineering but these days her focus is on delivery and ensuring the team has what they need to do a great job for the client.

Trudi manages one of Shine’s biggest sites. On site she is a scrum master, off site she manages the account and takes care of her people.

For fun, Trudi heads off for some paddle surfing.

Before work
Feed the chickens, rabbit, cat, and the seven guinea pigs. Knock off some work tasks and emails. Take a 5km walk. Get the kids up and ready for school.

The AM
Standup, standup, standup. Action blockers, fix problems, organise releases, coffee catchup. Meetings, meetings, meetings.

Lunch
At my desk or in a meeting.

The PM
Depending on the day; run retros, planning, or estimation ceremonies. Action blockers, fix problems, organise releases. Meetings, meetings, meetings.

After work
Cook dinner, hang out with the kids, put the animals to bed

I am awoken at noon by Cavendish, the upstairs butler. “I took the liberty of having your breakfast martini served on the terrace overlooking the croquet lawn, sir”. 

“Capital, Cavendish. It is, after all, another perfect day.”

“Indeed it is, sir”, he says while helping me into my dressing gown.

I sip my perfectly dry martini, made to my preferred recipe (chilled glass, gin, olive, stirred while reading the wikipedia page about vermouth). The gentle laughter of my wonderful children reaches my ears as they play on the croquet lawn. They’re discussing higher mathematics when one of them remembers the important charity work they were going to do in the community. They leave without tidying the mallets. Little scamps.

Rutherford, the garden butler, interrupts my reverie with a gentle cough.  “Terribly sorry to bring this up, sir, but the clients have been asking for your input into their strategy meeting all morning”, he says. 

He gestures, and a nearby servant glides over with a laptop on a silver tray. The laptop is open, and a video meeting with many participants is on the screen. Several of them speak at once, clamouring about architectures and governance and cloud initiatives. Rutherford, anticipating my needs, hands me a pen. On the napkin from under my martini I dash off a quick enterprise architecture. I hold it up to the screen and say, “build this”. 

I wave away the servant with the laptop. “Meetings are exhausting, Rutherford. I think I’ll take a bath.”

The bubbles from the warm bath soothe the stresses of my hectic schedule, relaxing my muscles and doing wonders for my skin. I attribute my youthful complexion entirely to regular bathing in Bollinger, you simply must try it. I wave the string quartet into silence and ring the bell to summon the bath butler. Inspiration has struck me, and I must have it recorded.

“Chadwick, prepare a pull request!”, I call to the butler from my cathedral of bubbles. I dictate a single line of code, heartbreaking in its elegant simplicity. No tests are needed, for it is perfection itself. No comments or documentation – one does not need to document a rose, or comment the Taj Mahal.

Later, in the library, I am responding to an email from NASA (begging me to reconsider my decision not to join their latest mission) when Faraday, the downstairs butler, requires my attention. I have a phone call from Stockholm. 

“It’s the Nobel committee, sir. They wish to give you the prize for Literature for today’s line of code.”

“Oh, how tedious. I thought I had made it clear that I do not want any more of their prizes, it is high time for someone else to be given the chance.”

“They were most insistent, sir. Several of the committee have not stopped weeping tears of joy since viewing the line, and one member plucked out her own eyes – declaring that she would never gaze upon anything as beautiful and perfect again.”

“I really must decline, it is quite embarrassing and we simply don’t have the room for all the medals. They have to stop.” 

“Very well, sir. I shall make it clear to them.”

That evening, after an excellent dinner prepared by Monsieur Pascal and his team in the kitchens, my family and I repair to the drawing room. The children play their latest compositions on the piano, while my wife tells us of the emergency brain surgery she had to perform when a member of the audience fell ill during her conducting the Philharmonic. It really is quite astonishing what one can do with merely a baton, a hair pin and a steady hand. All in all, another perfect day.