A Day in the Life of a Director of Engineering
In our last blog, we broke down some of the roles in a development team. One of the things we are passionate about is making sure that we have good relationships with our clients, which starts with being open about who we are, our goals and what we believe.
So, we’re starting a new series: “A Day in the Life.”
In this series, we will profile different members of our team with a mix of personal and professional questions so you can hear their thoughts in their words.
For the first installment, we’re talking to our brand new Director of Engineering, Brandon O’Hara. Brandon comes to us with extensive experience in software development across a number of roles, including having grown software agencies and founded his own successful saas platform. We are incredibly happy to have him here.
So without further ado, a day in the life of Brandon O’Hara, Director of Engineering.
What is your morning routine? How has that changed during the pandemic?
Before morning stand up, I begin most weekday mornings with a quick workout, cup of coffee, and time spent curating my todo list for the day.
Give us the quick version of your role at Steadfast. What are your responsibilities? What are you focused on?
My main responsibility is providing support between the engineering, project management and leadership teams. I want to ensure all team members are thriving at Steadfast, and have the support and resources they need to excel at their jobs. Additionally I'm responsible for helping create processes, documents, and estimates to allow the engineers to stay focused. And lastly, I still spend time being an engineer, writing code and fixing bugs.
On any given day, where do you end up spending most of your time?
The majority of my mornings are spent in my office. After the majority of my meetings are over, I take my laptop into my kitchen or patio.
What is your favorite tool that you use daily?
Although I have no loyalty to a single app, my entire day is organized through Todo apps like Todoist, Wunderlist and Asana.
What is the best possible lunch on a Wednesday?
Montana isn't known for it's tacos or proximity to the ocean, but the fish tacos from Taco del Sol are pretty incredible.
What is your go-to happy hour beverage?
I tend to gravitate towards bourbon on the rocks or dark craft beer.
If you could change one thing to improve the software development process, community, or industry, what is that change and how would that make your life better and other people’s lives better?
The majority of junior developers are focused on spending long hours filling their Github with incomplete projects and learning additional frameworks/languages for the sake of their resume. Being a developer doesn't need to mean long hours, and having a side project in your free time. The culture around always staying up to date with the thousands of new technologies leads to burn out, and takes away from the most important skill - finding and implementing solutions to complex problems.
At the end of the day, what is success for you?
Success is an empty todo list, with an eagerness to start the next day without taking away from my family time at night.