Sanath Srimal Punchibandage

From trainings to career planning, the program catered to my every need and answered every concern I had as a graduate entering a professional role. If you’re looking for a career pathway that is flexible and supports you every step of the way, you’re at the right place.

8.00 AM

Wake up and get ready for a morning walk/jog while listening to an audiobook.

9.00 AM

Start the work day going through emails and seeing what meetings I have scheduled.

9.30 AM

Attend my first meeting for the day, where we update the team on what we’re currently working on and how we’re progressing.

10.00 AM

Begin working on my assigned tasks, which usually involves opening up a code editor like Visual Studio Code to write code in. In order to create cloud infrastructure we write our code in Terragrunt files, which uses Terraform in the background. Using such software makes life a lot easier as we can just ‘declare’ what infrastructure we want built. I will then save my changes and push my code to Github, which is where all our code sits. This is where AWS (Amazon Web Services) does it’s magic and runs CodeBuild to prepare resources and ensure everything is ready to be merged. If it all checks out, I can merge my code to the master branch, and AWS will begin building all the infrastructure I have requested. More often than not, I will run into a build failure, which results in me then spending hours trying to figure out why. Welcome to coding guys.

12.30 PM

At this point I’ll make myself a tea to have with a biscuit (or three), and proceed to move onto another task such as working on an app. This particular app I was working on needed an in-built phone function, so we utilised Amazon Connect to create phone numbers, call flows and everything in between. This project used mainly Javascript, and involved building the UI as well as making API calls to Microsoft Teams so that we could provide data to the user. I realised that I had never worked with the React JS library before, so I spent some time watching Youtube tutorials to bring myself up to speed.

1.30 PM

I attend a meeting with the other grads on a fortnightly basis to touch base and see how we’re all going. Then after the meeting I’d keep working on the app or whatever task I was doing prior. And by working on the app I mean going to Stack Overflow and copy-pasting things until things start to work. #SoftwareEngineer

3.00 PM

Time for lunch. Shoutout to my mum and grandma for all the delicious meals!

3.30 PM

Self-development time. This is when I’ll allocate an hour of my day (if I’m not swamped with work) to study for a certification, or follow tutorials on different coding projects.

4.30 PM

Attend a meeting to show any working demo’s or discuss the issues I’m facing to get feedback.

5.00 PM

Finished for the day! If I have any last minute work I need to get done I’ll quickly do it now. Then I’ll wind down for a bit.

6.00 PM

Get some physical activity in! This can be anything from working out to walking the dog.

7.00 PM

Shower and then dinner time! This will usually be while watching tv. Also, if I get time I like to work on a personal project, side hustle, or skill for an hour each night.

10.00 PM

Get ready for the next day. Sometimes I write out a detailed schedule of what I’ll do every hour of the day, and then other times I’ll just write the main things I want to work on.

11.00 PM

Get to bed and scroll on social media for an hour before falling asleep. Admit it – you do it too!