Growing up, I was always good at the more practical side of subjects at school, be it in Applied Maths, Physics, Computing or Craft, Design and Technology (CDT). I was inspired by my dad as he possessed the blended skills of IT, electronics and engineering. He’s also great at DIY and has always been able to fix the family car whenever something went wrong. Inevitably those skills rubbed off on me, and I felt I was destined for a career in something technical. From an early age, my friends and I were all interested in cars and saw ourselves as ‘petrol heads’, I always thought I’d eventually end up becoming a mechanic. However, I later chose to go to university and study Computer Science.
After leaving university I interviewed at several companies and was excited to be accepted as a graduate Software Engineer at BAE Systems Digital Intelligence. It looked like there would be lots of interesting work for an extensive range of clients, which turned out to be true. 12 years on and I am pleased to have been able to progress through the company to now lead a sub-team of developers on a considerably sized Central Government project. I currently work in the client office one day a week and remotely for the remainder of the week.
Working in an agile way
The first thing I do each morning is check my meeting schedule for the day and catch up with any messages from members of the project. I work closely with the team scrum masters, technical architects, business analysts, testers, and programme managers to manage the delivery of the system. We have five development teams on the project who collaborate strongly with each other. I regularly check in with other teams to ensure that everyone is up to speed with progress and also offer my support and advice where needed.
Our project is one of many in BAE Systems Digital Intelligence that adopts an agile methodology, working in two week sprint cycles with all the respective sprint ceremonies. The first two are our 9:30am daily sub-team stand-up and 10.00am scrum of scrums. These sessions are really useful to find out how my team and other teams are progressing, as well as understand any problems and dependencies. Developers and teams often raise the need for help and separate discussions are spawned afterwards. Collaborating and supporting different teams can take up most of my time in the morning, but often a 15 minute call can save someone being stuck for a few hours, so it’s worth the investment.
This is the longest project I've been on during my time at BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, at roughly five years long so far. Even after this amount of time, I’m still finding new and interesting features to develop or challenges to overcome. The five sub-teams each have a particular focus on the project, but all work collaboratively together to deliver a single product to the customer.
As a Software Engineer, I get involved with a lot of different tasks within the team. This can vary from working with project leads to help define the direction of the project, to guiding other team members through tasks and coding new features. I'd say a good 50:50 split is made up of team management and programming.
The start of lunch is usually signalled by a hangry cat jumping on the desk if I’m working remotely, somewhere between 12-1pm. During lunch, I catch up on any group chats with friends. I’m still very much a petrol head, and picking a career in IT has helped keep my automotive hobby going. After lunch, I pick up any messages left whilst I've been away, and get stuck back in.
Project life as a Software Engineer
There's a few regular weekly calls in the diary. We have an architecture forum where ideas for solutions are put forward for discussion. It's a good place to share ideas, improve our architecture and find any flaws before implementing them. We also have a fortnightly show and tell where we can demonstrate the effort the teams have put in over the last two weeks. It's satisfying to see the application evolve and increase in functionality each time.
Once everyone else in my team is organised, I'll start on some coding for my tickets. I'm a Software Engineer, with my main background being in Java. I've gained hands on experience of a few extra technologies during my time on the project, notably Apache Kafka, ReactJS and Elasticsearch. I always enjoy picking up new skills and applying them.
We often have user acceptance testing of the latest release of code. The senior developers spend time to prepare the code ready to be released and tested by the client. This is the first time the users get to see and use a test version of the new system to be released. It’s also the first time we get to see how the system reacts with real data, which keeps us on our toes!
I usually log off about 6pm. My day starts to wind down from 5pm, so it’s a good time to get stuck in to coding without too many disruptions.
Life outside the day job
I try to plan my day so I can log off a bit early on a Monday to cook dinner and go out. I’ve played badminton since I was about 10 and my local club plays on Monday evenings. It was hard to motivate myself to keep playing badminton when I first started working after university, but I really didn’t want to lose it as a skill and made the effort to start playing again about six years ago. We play in local leagues against other clubs in the area, which helps keep me active and is something to separate my work from my home life.
When I’m not at badminton, I’ll try to go for a walk or run in the evening. If that attempt fails, and often it does, then you’ll find me winding down in front of the TV. On the rare special occasion I’ll be at comedy gigs with my family, seeing tours from some of the big names.
I’ve always been in to comedy, but only started going to live gigs in the last five years or so. The pandemic temporarily put a stop to that and I’ve only just caught up with the backlog of postponed shows that were booked for that year. In the last year I’ve seen Rob Beckett, Chris McCausland, Jack Whitehall and Dara O’Brien. A very different mix of styles, but I enjoyed all of them.
I also like to maintain and modify cars, having previously modified several normal road cars into high performance cars for track days and racing. It’s a good opportunity to put my mechanical skills to the test, and I find it quite creative. I’ve previously raced a classic BMW 3 series and I’m now building a (not so high performance) Citroen C1 endurance racing car with some of my friends. This is our second C1 after the first one spectacularly rolled at Silverstone towards the beginning of this year. We’re only six races down and we’ve been slowly creeping up the rankings. Our best finishing position was 8th out of roughly 50 cars over a 3hr race. We’re still aiming for that podium.
Hopefully the rest of my year brings successful deployments on the project, a new race car hitting the track, and a few more comedy shows!
If you feel inspired by Mark’s employee story, we’re currently recruiting diverse teams of driven individuals who share our passion for technology and mission to protect the connected world.
If you feel inspired by Mark’s employee story, we’re currently recruiting diverse teams of driven individuals who share our passion for technology and mission to protect the connected world.
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