A Day In The Life… Of Joost Stapersma

My name is Joost Stapersma and I work as a Mendix Business Engineer at Mansystems Nederland B.V. By writing this short story I would like to describe my typical working day at a relatively small IT company located in the vibrant city of Barneveld (actually it’s a small village mostly known for the surplus of chickens, but vibrant sounded better :-) ).

Today is a rainy Tuesday in February, with a busy schedule ahead. For starters, there is a 2-hour meeting regarding the new internal team setup. In addition, I need to complete development of a customization that needs to be reviewed and delivered before the end of the week.

My working day usually starts with coffee, followed by a drive of approximately 1 hour depending on the traffic jams between Amsterdam and Barneveld. Once arrived I start with checking and answering e-mails, followed by more coffee. I like to make a habit of answering non-urgent emails in the early morning instead of as they come in. This prevents too much distraction during the course of the day which gives me more time to focus on the important stuff.

Next up is completing development for a project of one of our customers. For this specific customer we have altered the CMDB module of ExpertDesk to manage sales and distribution of consumer products like dishwashers and microwaves. A feedback session with the customer lead us to develop an interface to automatically obtain product information from an online database to prevent them from having to google it themselves.

This is also what I like most about my work: having almost complete freedom to discuss, develop and implement requirements for a customer. As a business engineer I am involved from start to finish, starting with customer interviews up to installing the changes on the live environment and answering questions as part of the aftercare phase. It is very rewarding to see a satisfied customer making good use of a piece of software that I helped design, develop and implement.

Lunch time already! Fortunately there is no need for me to bring my own lunch as we have an outstanding catering service. Usually there is a lot of chit-chat going on between colleagues from all departments, ranging from discussing politics to mocking modern day reality TV shows. To give you an example: one time my boss started bragging about his singing ‘skills’ at which almost everyone replied like: hey, at least you’re a great manager!

After lunch I usually try to get out of the building and go for a walk. The scenery isn’t great, but at least I get to clear my head before another busy afternoon. During the walk a support engineer asked me if I could assist in a code review for an urgent support issue. This means we walk through all the changes together and verify things like maintainability, performance as well as potentially missed impact on other functionality. Although the review was unscheduled I decided to assist him as I had some time left until the team meeting.

Luckily the team meeting finished early; we all agreed on a change to our way of working (in this case something regarding writing documentation for our projects) which should save us all time while not hurting the quality of our deliveries.

This also meant that I got to go home early today, which cuts down the traffic jams and allows me to catch up on the latest Formula 1 news ahead of the new season which is about to start. I’ll catch up on lost hours next week as I have a major release scheduled.

So this is it, a typical working day as a business engineer. If this sounds like a nice working day for you, I recommend you to take a look on our job vacancy page, we have some really nice opportunities available at the moment. When interested please get in touch with my colleague Anja Robbertsen from our HR department via anja.robbertsen@mansystems.nl.