When did you start at TEN7, and what were you doing prior to joining us?
Why did you accept the offer and later decide to go full time?
What does your daily routine look like now?
What's your favorite part of the day?
IVAN STEGIC: Hello! You're listening to a TEN7 Audiocast! We're here today for a team member interview with Les Lim, our Senior Developer! I'm Ivan Stegic, founder and president of TEN7. Hey, Les.
LES LIM: How you doing?
IVAN: Fine! How are you?
LES: I'm doing alright! I'm about to start Twin Cities Drupal camp in a couple of days and so I'm running a little frazzled right now.
IVAN: I'm glad that we have this time. It won't take too long. Do you remember when when you started at TEN7 and what were you doing before you started with us?
LES: I do! It was about five years ago. I was working at small web shop in town. There were probably about 1½ developers working there at the time. I was looking to sort of reach out and diversify my experience of what working in various web shops be like. It was my that had been my first job. I never really had the experience of working with a team of other people of other developers for a while at that point, a view of how other places did business.
IVAN: When you first started working with us, it was kind of a part-time basis and then you moved to full time. Can you speak to why you decided that working full time at TEN7 would be something you would do?
LES: That wasn't even in the long term plan. I thought that I might bounce around from company to company for a while - be a journeyman, or a freelancer - and just sort of pick-up the business to understand more about the process. I'm obsessed with process in certain ways. I'd like efficiencies. I like figuring out how other people do things. I originally thought TEN7 would just be like a first stop in a number of places where I would sort of figure out how other people did stuff and that turned into five years. I think the reason why I accepted the offer was because in the short time that I've been working part time, I saw TEN7 a place where I thought like I could help and I could help bring processes up to modern day standards. I could help mentor other developers. I could be help getting support on things that I didn't know about from a team of other people. I thought I saw a place or an opportunity where my particular skills that time fit really well with where we were as a company back then, so I wanted to see it out.
IVAN: And we welcomed you and we love having you with us. Part of your daily routine - you write a lot of code and you participate in a very technical aspect of our company. Can you describe what's your daily routine looks like? What do you do on a typical day?
LES: Sure. I think a lot of the time is spent initially looking through JIRA trying to figure out what the lay of the land is, with regard to where projects are, where particular tickets or issues are. My day is split between development projects that I am heading up and reviewing code that other team members are working on right now. Let's say probably half of my day right now is reviewing other developers code, talking with them, looking for places where efficiencies might be made, or eliminate or help technical death by writing code slightly differently. That has been of a change in the last few years. We're moving more into the role of reviewing other people's code, but it's one that I've been embracing more and more. I get a little less time to work on developer stuff right now, but I feel like it’s a better situation where we get to introspect the reasons why we're doing things in real time in a conversational format. That's been a good thing.
IVAN: Do you think that's the favorite part of your day or is there some other time during the day that you really look forward to that you really love?
LES: Oh no. My favorite part of my day is lunch time, without a doubt. That has always been the case. I love lunch but now that we've been working at home, it's been easy that either I hop on my bike and go out there just like a local pizza joint or just make some eggs or whatever. I really enjoy cooking and it's something that I missed in the office. Being able to cook food for myself is a nice break through the day. And then, because we're at home as long as the calendar provides, I've a little more time to take my time doing stuff like if I wanna take 90 minutes in the middle of the day being able to make some lunch, have some coffee, and then take a nap or something-- that's revolutionize my daily experience.
IVAN: I'm glad to hear that! I do recall on the first year, you were in the office with us. You did ask if we could get a stove in the office and what that would mean for ventilation and unfortunately, I wasn't able to make that happen for you. I guess that happened inevitably anyway.
LES: Yeah! I mean I did get my nap time in though. So it wasn't a total loss.
IVAN: Well, Les, thank you for your time. That does brings us to the end of this Audiocast. Please visit us at TEN7.com and keep an eye out on the TEN7 blog for future Audiocasts. This is Ivan Stegic and thank you for listening.