Ap de Meyer
BI Developer

The week of Ap

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Monday

I work 32 hours and I'm off this Monday!

So I go kitesurfing, because there is a nice breeze! Have a good day at work everyone! :-)

(Editorial comment: Ap can laugh in real life.)

Tuesday

Working "at home" today in Amsterdam.

As usual, we begin the Daily at 8:45. In which everyone briefly states what they are going to do, what the goal is for today, and whether previous goals have been met. This never happens without laughter.

For a customer, we retrieve payment data from Dynamics. Dynamics has several modules that store "the same" data in different ways in a large number of tables. We are under the assumption that the part we are currently using to populate the DWH is not complete and therefore want to check this data with the contents of the other module.

In terms of work, this means first unlocking this data. To do this, the Dynamics tables are pushed to an Azure Storage environment. This is done by the clients themselves.

Using Azure Data Factory, we retrieve this data and put it into the Staging layer of our DWH. We hope we collected enough tables to make the comparison.

There is no data model and Dynamics contains hundreds of tables, all of which can be configured individually. So it takes some searching and analysis, getting another table, and finding which columns can be logically linked whether the result then somewhat matches what we expect, and whether this is comparable with the data we already have. Sometimes you're out in an hour a little longer.

Today it takes a little longer. Glad that I once did Business Administration. This is not something I can spend all day doing, and fortunately, there is enough variety to do something else for a while.

Some work needs to be done on our OKR (Objectives and Key Results). OKRs are done with small teams. An OKR I'm working on this quarter is about organizational structures.

We are a growing company, in which we are all very involved, the very flat structure helps that and everyone wants to contribute and takes responsibility.

Therefore, we are now looking at whether a holacratic organization or at least that direction, can help us in growth, motivation, job satisfaction, division of labor, etc. That means reading up on it, listening to it (podcast/YouTube), and preparing a presentation for it. I don't have to do this alone but with the help of everyone on the OKR team.

That wraps up Tuesday!

Wednesday

At the Rotterdam office, though fairly early, 7:30, on the train. Fortunately a fast connection, I am forty minutes away by train. My cycling time, 10 minutes in Amsterdam and 10 minutes in Rotterdam, I do not count, I do that for fun.

And upon arrival back on the dock I'm enjoying the view for a while. That already makes me happy. The Euromast, The SS-Rotterdam, Kop van Zuid, all in one view.

At 8:45 we again have the daily. To do for me today is the shipping/container business, after all, I am in Rotterdam ;-). It's cozy in the office again. Well, when you work from home most of the time, you also want to catch up with your colleagues.

Making data readable/interpretable. We are developing a DataVault for this client. Colleagues have developed a tool that makes it reasonably easy to generate relevant hub's and sat's (Datavault tables).

But for me, this is my first time using this, so need to explore it a bit. Fortunately, everyone is happy to help if you want to know something or can't figure something out.

I should mention lunch:

At the Rotterdam office, we always have a nice, well-varied lunch, partially prepared by our facility manager, and whatever someone happens to bring.

Fortunately, more than cheese and sprinkles (hagelslag). And it's another one of those welcoming moments of relaxation with your colleagues.

But enough relaxation for today, tonight we have the Pub Quiz at our "tribal" café. First out to dinner, and then to serious(...) Pubquizen. And we are doing good ;-)

By the way, we did win this evening :-)
A little walk after the pub quiz, poetic freedom

Thursday

That Pub Quiz is making it difficult, but I have to get up early. I regularly squash and this morning I have a "match" at 7:15. Then I will be at my workplace in time for today's daily. My workplace today is a friend's office, also in Amsterdam.

Then I have some company and also a shared lunch (slightly less than at AYB)

Dashboarding today. PowerBI dashboards need to be created and/or customized for a client.

This is not my strongest skill yet, but fun to do. At All Your BI, I get the space to expand my knowledge and skills for that. Both in depth and width.

And time to learn new techniques and tools. But also space to experiment with new tools or techniques. For example, if a tool that we've put time into doesn't turn out to work for us, then tough luck,

if it does work it is "Time well spent." We all benefit from it through the weekly Show&Tell on Thursday afternoons, where everyone takes turns giving a presentation of what they think is of interest to the team.

Back home, I stumble across a mail package behind the front door. It's another beer/beverage package sent by AYB, for our online game night, or a late-night online meeting, or whatever reason ;-)

Friday

This day is the "meeting day." Instead of the Daily, we have a morning "developer-weekly" half-hour, discussing what we have run into or discovered in the past week, good or bad.

And it's followed by the weekly, where we always start with everyone's good news of the week. My good news: I managed to get tickets for Bruce Springsteen!

It certainly doesn't have to be work-related news. It is always nice to share some more personal things besides work.

This week also the sprint-retro, how did it go in the last sprint (three weeks), what went well, and what can be improved?

After wrapping up this week's work, I bike home and when I get home, I open a delicious craftbeer from yesterday's beer package.

A perfect ending to my work week!