A Day in the Life: Phoebe Greig & Misa Ogura
They met at Makers and recently got engaged. Here, Makers alumni Phoebe & Misa talk about becoming software engineers, co-founding Women Driven Development, and life at the BBC.
We both came from different backgrounds: Phoebe, a half-Persian Jew, worked in Finance — Misa a Cancer Cell Biologist at Cancer Research UK, moved over to the UK from Japan for her undergraduate studies.
We were both not happy in our chosen careers. It was at Makers where we first met. Nearly 3 years later, we both work at the BBC (in different teams and buildings) and we are also engaged!
Together, we have founded Women Driven Development, which brings together gender minorities and leaders in tech to connect and share, promoting sponsorship through hackathons, practical sessions and events. This is our day.
7.45am
Alarm goes off and we snooze for 30 mins! Eventually, we start getting ready for work and if there is time, we make our packed lunches (our favourite is smoked salmon bagel).
9am
We head to work. We have (loose) commuter rules — from our flat to where we change lines at Holborn, our phones are not allowed out. When we board the central Line, we have time for ourselves to browse online.
However, when we arrive at White City, our phones go away again while we head to our favourite coffee shop Coco Di Mama.
10am
We part ways outside Coco Di Mama.
Misa
I’m part of the Data Team within IRFS (Internet Research and Future Services), where we focus on developing reusable tools for content analysis.
IRFS sits at the crosspoint of original research and software/hardware development — we look five years ahead to explore how the BBC can stay relevant to our audience, whose behaviours change as new technologies emerge.
We develop machine learning-based algorithms, such as STT (speech-to-text), facial recognition and speaker identification. Our automatic STT transcription system is already used widely within BBC.
11am
Every Thursday, IRFS members get together for Show & Tell. For the past few months, my team has been focusing on improving the vocabulary of our STT system, so that it can recognise words such as Brexit in the right context.
It is critical for our system to be able to keep up with the fast evolving vocabulary, identify important missing words and incorporate them into the algorithm. We have been working hard to develop and automate this process.
Recently, I presented our work on behalf of the Data Team. Since I joined in March 18’, I have been presenting whenever an opportunity comes up.
When presenting, you get to learn so much more about the project — it allows you to understand it from a broader perspective, and to realise where gaps in the knowledge lie. Being able to communicate the importance of your work, especially to those who don’t necessarily have the domain knowledge, is such a valuable skill to have!
1pm
I often eat lunch at my desk, as it is an opportunity to work on my own study. I spend most of this time either reading or writing technical articles or going through online courses. (Here are some of the articles I’ve published on Medium: JS Demystified Series, and Machine Learning Bit by Bit Series.)
Recently, I was granted a deep learning scholarship by Udacity and Facebook AI. So these days I’m usually busy building deep neural networks for various tasks such as image recognition, style transfer and sentiment analysis.
My manager has been very supportive of my study, so I also get to spend every Friday working on this scholarship course. BBC loves investing in people and that’s why I love working here.
2pm
Retro. Working in R&D doesn’t mean that you can’t go agile!
Needless to say, having learnt at Makers, worked in very agile teams in production environment and being a Scrum Master, I’m a massive fan of agile.
I have been working on introducing structures that help my team be more focused, flexible and productive. We work in 2-week sprints with sprint planning, daily stand-ups and retrospective.
Today is the second Thursday of the sprint, so we got together for a retrospective. We reflected on tickets we worked on during the sprint, identified blockers and shared our learnings.
3pm
For the rest of the day, I pair with Matt, one of my colleagues, to perform statistical analysis of English pronunciation system. We also write code to benchmark the performance of our STT algorithm with enhanced vocabulary.
Phoebe
I work in the BBC’s Content Production Workflow team. We build the tools that all BBC journalists use, to create content for the many different BBC sites and apps around the world. We also build the APIs that feed BBC websites and apps.
Currently, I am running an epic team, with 5 badass Software Engineers, a couple of testers and UX. My epic is implementing functionality so that BBC journalists can write in RTL scripts e.g. Arabic.
We also get to design and implement how we should store the language/script within our API so that the dev teams who consume it can for example render articles on BBC Persia website and display bi-directional text correctly.
10.15am
Standup. Our epic team gets together in front of a board displaying our work for the next 2 weeks. I go through the active tickets and get an update from the individual(s) who worked on that ticket the day before.
It is here that we get volunteers for any code reviews, ensure everyone has someone to pair with (if possible) and mix up the pairs, ensuring that pairs have differing dev experience, as well as assign new tickets to work on.
10.20am
Main standup. CPW is a big team, so we typically have 3 or 4 epics running at one time. The main standup is for the epic leads to give an overview of the current state of their epic and for us to be aware of any changes or developments within the BBC that could impact our epic’s work.
10.30am
Coding — woop woop! We are big fans of pair programming, test driven development and behaviour driven development in my team. So after the main standup, I will typically join my pair and we’ll start getting our code on!
One person usually writes a unit/integration test (written in jest and enzyme) and then the other person makes the test pass (normally followed by a high five!).
Our web apps are written in javascript using react and node for our server, and our API’s are written in Scala. We also run our e2e tests (written in webdriver, selenium and cucumber) prior to our code reviews.
1pm
The entire team typically eats lunch together in the canteen area. However, I will often do some technical analysis/preparation and admin work for my epic during this time. We decided to do bi-weekly sprints, where we have a retrospective, planning and sometimes even a pre-planning meeting.
So I have to prepare for those meetings and then often I will have actions from them (e.g. splitting up the tickets/work, adding more details, reaching out to the news dev team etc to discuss technical decisions etc).
2pm
Yay! More coding! (Although, some days we will have a couple of meetings and every other Thursday we have 10% day, where you get to work on any coding project you want!)
5.30pm
Out with a friend, over drinks and dinner, and a trusty Old Fashioned!
Or — teaching at Codebar, organising a Lesbians Who Tech event (Phoebe is Co-Director of LWT, London) or a Women in Data Science event (Misa leads the London Chapter).
As mentioned, we also co-founded WDD. In October 18’ we held our first #TechItForward Hackathon at Google, where over 60 women (including Makers alumni) came together to code and solve real world problems.
We have just launched our next hackathon, that will be at Expedia Group in March 19’. Click here for more info and to apply!
In summary: we both can say wholeheartedly that becoming Software Engineers and joining Makers have been the best decisions we have ever made… and not just because we met there!
