Today was my first full day at my desk. Still trying to arrive to work by 8am, because #dctraffic. Since I can eat breakfast at work (unlimited amounts of cereal), I thought this would be a good move, but I was super sleepy today. Most engineers don’t roll in until 9:30, so I have flexibility when I need it.

Although I was tired, adrenaline kept me going since my excitement has yet to worn off. I started off by decorating my desk with items I brought from my previous desk and my classroom at TJ. You know I had to bring my favorite stickers! It finally sank in that I have no drawers, no closet, and no filing cabinet. I guess if you don’t use paper at all, you don’t need that stuff.

Since the engineering teams here practice agile development, I learned that our daily stand-up scrum happens at 11am. My seven-person team moved to some open floor space about five feet away from where we sit. We stood in a very lopsided circle because #space. One by one, we reviewed what we did yesterday and what we planned on working on today. There was an opportunity for some short clarifying questions, but longer discussions were tabled until after the meeting. I was told the meetings take between 5-15 minutes each day. Standing still is hard for me with my osteoarthritis in my lower back, but there is an awesome wall I can lean against if necessary.

Today also saw the first company wide all-hands virtual meeting. I think these take place weekly, but I’m not sure yet. This is where we learn the big picture stuff. Pretty exciting because that’s how I will learn what all the cool things my company is doing. There was fast-talking folks, few slides, and big announcements. No rehashing of what I’ve already read in an email. My kind of briefing!

My team leader meets with all team members once a week for a 30-minute check in. Since this is an open office, we headed to a private conference room for my first one. These meetings are two-fold: for my team leader to see how I’m feeling about the work I’m doing and to find out if there is anything he can be doing differently to support me. #ifeelsupported

Right after the meeting, I learned that I missed the weekly hopper-half-hour, a time for the women engineers to come together to talk about whatever. I mentioned this to my team leader and without any hesitation, he said that he’ll reschedule our weekly check-ins to accomodate this item in my schedule. #ifeelsupported

Most of the day was filled with requesting access to every system I will need for work. This meant sending individual emails for each system to the tech team, waiting for responses, and then following directions to get set up with systems that I don’t even know what they do yet. Tedious, but I felt like I was getting somewhere. Thank goodness I set up all my email filters the day before…I never would have seen these important instructions among the thousands of messages I receive an hour!

Learned that announcements about food are through Slack, so that’s yet another window I need to keep open. Not sure how important this because because I have yet to see food ever run out. Most of the engineers have three monitors on their desk. I’m sure I’ll get there, but I can totally see why that’s needed. How I ever existed with one monitor at my previous job, I’ll never know.

Found out that Wednesday is 90s day and people will dress up. I thought all day about what to wear and was coming up blank. I joined a few former colleagues for trivia after work. One of them was in the same high school graduating class as the founders of my company. She kept her senior shirt with all of their names on the back. Voila, my costume was born!

Update on Ria vs. Mac: the desktop and I have become one. I had to bring in my own ergonomic mouse, but I’m really doing okay with everything being backwards (yes, I feel that way about Macs). Note: I haven’t even touched my laptop yet. It might be Christmas before I take the plunge to open it. The MacBook trackpad is not my friend.

All in all, today was very much administrative, but I’m starting to get a feel for the culture. Me likey.

hours of sleep = 5;  steps = 5,800;  lines of code written = 0;