A day in the life of Pablo: Our Lead Software Engineer’s code & coffee routines
February 27, 2024
Pablo’s day kicks off not with code, but a solid gym session, before he jumps on the tube to our Soho office. Usually, he is watching anime (happens most days, his favourite being Naruto), but occasionally he also refreshes his memory on the (quite a few) different languages he’s speaking and learning.
Pablo enjoys coming into the office, he’s been working remotely for around a decade, and he loves being able to take a break, grab a snack and have a chat with the rest of the team. He’s been with us for nearly four years (celebrating four in March!), and the first three he was working remotely from Brazil. He finally made the move across the globe in August last year.
Coffee & Updating the Work Environment
The first thing on the agenda when he arrives into the office is coffee. He prefers it short and black, normally opting for an espresso.
Once the coffee is consumed, it’s time to update the work environment; Pablo ensures all packages and plugins are refreshed, “it just feels wrong if they aren’t,” he says.
A few weeks ago, Pablo got a new standing desk, which he loves. The desk environment is neat, with only the necessities. He says that, ideally, he’d love to have ten different monitors, but right now, he makes do with his Mac and curved screen. Pablo is a self-proclaimed master of shortcuts, it’s definitely one of his hidden talents - he barely touches his trackpad, and it looks like it was just taken out the box about five minutes ago.
Setup
In terms of his setup, we got a quick rundown over the important bits:
- Terminal: Warp (Experimenting) with ZSH
- Editor: Neovim https://github.com/pablobfonseca/dotfiles.git and Emacs http://github.com/pablobfonseca/emacs.d - call it controversial, but Pablo is ready for a discussion.
- OS: Mac OS
Pablo also made his own dotfiles installer http://github.com/pablobfonseca/dotfiles-installer.git, which has been a life saver for him. He got too tired of manually updating his setup, and wanted to be able to quickly set up new machines and sync configurations on his systems. He highly recommends this, as it saves so much time in the long run.
While coding, Pablo enjoys listening to podcasts (gym related, as he’s an avid gym goer #gains) and music (anything from rap to blues).
Useful Links and Websites
Like most devoted developers, Pablo opts to visit several different websites for any news and to keep up to date with the industry.
Some of his recommendations are:
- Exercism.io
Open source, free online learning platform for coding, across 67 different languages.
- Codewars.com
Another great website for learning programming. Users are able to solve challenges and move up in ranks in their specific languages.
- Dev.to
Online community for developers who wish to connect with others in the industry, and share articles, tutorials or insights.
- YouTube channels like devaslife
Many YouTube channels dedicated to coding offer tutorials, ranging in levels of knowledge and experience, and discussions on trending topics, tools and skills.
- Daily.dev
Daily.dev is an extension for your browser, where you can get a customised feed of content tailored to your exact interests.
Pablo’s favourite newsletters are TLDR, which is a daily newsletter summarising stories within startups, tech and programming, and SubStack, which offers a wide range of articles and newsletters, from art and culture, to technology and business.
Websites for Beginners
- Freecodecamp.org
By far the best one for beginners, and completely free.
- Codecademy
One of the most common go-to platforms for learning. Codecademy provides different membership levels, from basic (free) to Pro.
- Frontend Masters
As the name entails, this platform focuses on courses in frontend. Here, you can choose between different paths, based on experience and your tech stack.
- Egghead.io
Wide range of full-stack courses for developers.