"To be a good software developer you need creativity."

Beata is a software developer at Crystalloids. She moved to the Netherlands five years ago and joined the company in April 2017. We asked her how the typical day of a developer looks like and what it takes to do her job well.

What time to do you wake up? 

I don’t have a regular time, sometimes I wake up at 5 and sometimes at 6.

Do you work from the office or remotely?

Most of the time I work from our Rotterdam office but at least once a week from the customer’s site.

What project are you currently working on? 

I am currently working on two projects: For our client, I chase information about customers and the sources they came from. Then I bring all the data together so that we know about the customer as much as possible. This information is then being used by our client to do personalised marketing campaigns and react better to their customers’ needs. The second project is moving our InsightOS platform from Dart + Polymer to Angular Dart.

What are your customers like?

The people I work with are different from each other, one of them is very friendly, the other one is more direct, factual, but very smart and knowledgeable about IT. I like that they are open and willing to understand what we are doing.

Do you work in a team or alone?

For our customer we work in a team of 2-3 people and for the InsightOS project I work with one extra person.

How do you spread tasks?

I focus more on the code, technical testing and my colleague is doing the functional testing. The big advantage of that is that we have two different points of view and we can find bugs easily.

How long do you work on a project?

For the current customer from the beginning of this year, for my previous customer half a year and the InsightOS project will take around 2-4 months to complete.

How many times a day do you check Facebook?

Two to three times a day, mostly in the bus when I'm bored.

What do you read?

Technical blogs, software quality blogs and stuff about coaching and psychology. I read mostly online and that’s how I also fall asleep.

What do you like most about your job?

Flexibility and working in the scrum team where everyone has the same importance, no managers, no strict hierarchy. Google Could Platform is pretty fun to work with, too, because I can process and play with big data and find hidden patterns which humans are not able to.

What do you like least about your job?

Travelling time to the customer, it takes me in total six to seven hours a day, once or twice a week.

How do you spend your free time?

Reading, learning mathematics and going to the theatre (stand up, cabaret).

What are the important skills that are needed for your job?

Creativity. Everyone can learn code, but if you are not creative you cannot solve problems. Code architecture and code design are also important because you cannot build something useful without it. What you get is hard to maintain, it’s a monster basically, taking too much time to extend.

What keeps you motivated to go to work each day? 

It’s a natural thing for me to go to work every day, I have passion for technology and it’s a joy to solve problems.