It’s difficult to pin down the daily routine of someone in the data team as it’s so new and we’re growing so fast, but I’ll give it my best shot!
I normally turn up to the office at about 8:30, very breathless from my frantic cycle to work after leaving home 10 minutes later than I should have, and down some water to make sure I’m hydrated for the day ahead.
I’m usually one of the first people in the team to log on so I use that quiet time to check my emails, alerts on Slack, do some training on Udemy, and catch up with other team’s Slack channels so I’m aware of what’s going on in the wider company. Occasionally I’ll do some Looker dashboard maintenance to keep things running smoothly for those who use our data dashboards.
After that I’ll consult the to-do list I wrote at the end of the day before and start planning what I need to do and who I need to talk to to tick things off that list!
At 9:15 we have our team’s daily stand-up where everyone shares what they plan on doing and raises any issues that have popped up since the day before. It’s a great way of keeping up to speed with what the other parts of the team are up to like the analytics engineers and data scientists.
On Mondays and Wednesdays I’m in charge of answering questions on the #askdata channel where we get questions or requests about the Looker dashboards / Looks and the platform data.
From that point on I get stuck into tackling my to-do list. At the moment, this usually involves tasks for my current project of creating Looker dashboards for Customer Success to use in their executive meetings with our customers. I will frequently ask the other analysts if I’m unsure or stuck on something and they’re always super helpful.
I also start contacting people from other teams who can help me get a solid idea of how things work in the backend of the platform or how we engage with customers to make sure I’m interpreting and using the data we got from the platform in the right way.
At lunch I usually round up one or more of the team if they’re in the office and we head to Castle Park or to the roof of the office to enjoy our break. Occasionally we’ll play a light-hearted round of table tennis in the first floor cafe.
After lunch I’m back to working on my tasks for the day and this is usually where I hit my productive stride and start thinking about the next steps and where I’ll get to by the end of the day.
If building visualizations is part of my day I really enjoy putting these together and adding dimensions or measures here or there to the Looker model.
At some point in the day someone in the data team usually puts in a pull request review on GitHub. At the moment these requests are usually centred around maintaining the Looker model files which is extremely dry to review – I normally have to grab a hot / fizzy drink to help me through!
Around 5 o’clock I write down my to-do list for the following day. From then I either head home or head out for a team social to one of the many eating / drinking places near the office.
