A Day in the Life of Bukola

Kensho’s Day in the Life, a series started by the Diversity and Inclusion committee at Kensho, gives readers the opportunity to glimpse into the day-to-day experiences of these employees and their journeys in arriving where they are today.

Hello, my name is Bukola and I’m a software engineer based in Kensho’s New York City office. This is a day in my life.

Friday, August 10, 2018

6:00 am: I wake up to the upbeat hum of music rising around my room and quickly press snooze… three snoozes later and I’m up. I grab my phone and scroll through my emails and social media.

6:30 am: After looking through my emails, I start my day with a ten-minute meditation. Meditation adds so much value to my life; not only does it reduce stress but it also puts me in a good mood to start my day.

7:00 am: I grab my gym bag, which I packed the night before, and walk to the subway. Unfortunately, there are subway delays. I use this time to look at Kensho’s Slack for any work updates and listen to one of my favorite podcasts, The Read. Kid Fury and Crissle, the hosts of the podcast, always provide hilariously candid commentary on pop culture. I laugh a little too hard listening to them, and get some glances on the subway.

8:00 am: I stroll into Equinox. Kensho provides a free membership in the NYC office, which is a great perk. At Equinox, I make my way to the weights section and I turn on my workout playlist; it is a mix of Wande Coal, Wizkid, Ty Dolla $ign and Beyoncé. With my playlist motivating me, I do squats, deadlifts, and accessory lifts to help with my strength and stability.

9:30 am: After my workout and shower, I walk across the street to One World Trade. On my way, I pass large crowds of bustling people in suits and feel grateful that I can wear jeans and a t-shirt to work. I take an elevator to the 64th floor sky lobby and pause to enjoy the stunning bird’s eye view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the city’s skyscrapers. Then I take another elevator to the 76th floor.

View from 64th floor sky lobby by Hamzah Qudsi

9:35 am: In the office, I head immediately to Kensho’s fully-stocked kitchen and make myself oatmeal and coffee while I chat with some of my coworkers. We talk about our plans for the weekend.

9:50 am: I head to my desk and start working. As an engineer on the Internal Tools & Test Infrastructure team, I spend the majority of my day developing tools that help other engineers measure and increase the quality of their code.

12:30 pm: Lunch time! Today we have Eataly in the office! Every week the office gets catered lunch, which usually corresponds with an engineering-centered talk or a social talk. Today’s talk is My Story, where Kenshins give a presentation on their life history to the entire office. I really enjoy hearing about the lives of my coworkers; everyone seems to have such unique, interesting, and oftentimes hilarious life stories. Today, our interns are presenting; one intern presents on how he sailed across the Atlantic Ocean.

1:30 pm: I return to my desk, and spend some time reading and responding to the comments on code I recently published to Phabricator, our code review software. I message Adity, my manager, with follow-up questions on her comments.

Kensho practices continuous deployment, which means that we push code out many times a day. We have infrastructure and tests in place to make sure that code that is pushed out does not negatively impact other systems.

Today, I’m finishing up a load testing tool, which uses locust.io and Flask. This tool allows engineers to swarm their endpoints with many users, and helps them figure out how many concurrent users a project can handle.

I make changes to my code and publish it to Kensho’s codebase!

3:00 pm: Snack time! I head to the kitchen and grab a Larabar and the famous Wisconsin water La Croix.

3:20 pm: I add more documentation to my project and program additional features to the load testing tool. I talk to Eugene, a machine learning engineer, who is looking to use my tool to load test Kensho’s search service. He’d like to capture metrics on the performance of the service to make sure there aren’t any unexpected bottlenecks.

Together, we use the load testing tool to send thousands of concurrent requests to his endpoint. We discover that his project can handle large numbers of requests and also processes them very quickly.

6:30 pm: Every Friday our office has Drink Cart, where people gather to socialize over their choice of refreshment, including a special cocktail of the week. Sireesh, a machine learning engineer and talented mixologist, is making Whiskey Sours and Disaronno Sours.

Image by Billy Janitsch

Sadly, I have to skip Drink Cart, because of dinner plans with friends. I leave the office and head to West Village to grab dinner at Salam. Over some baba ganoush, hummus and tasty entrees, we discuss a festival we are attending later this month and plan out what we want to wear and who we want to see at the festival. Erykah Badu and Miguel are at the top of our list! We also discuss the New York primaries and who we plan to vote for.

Salam Restaurant in NYC

9:00 pm: I head back to my apartment and talk to my roommates about their day and other things going on in their lives.

10:00 pm: After an exhausting day, I’m really happy to be winding down. I wash my face, exfoliate, brush my teeth and head to bed.

View from 64th floor lounge by Sireesh Gururaja

Special thanks to Adity, Cheska, Lelaina, Michaela, Ben, Patrick, Predrag, Toph and Tom for their review, feedback, and patience.