Profile

I came to the UK to study Computer Science in 2011. I now live in Salford/Manchester with my two kitties who are lovely though a bit mischievous sisters. I spend most of my free-time playing games on my PC or travelling. One of my big life goals is to visit every country in Europe (I have about 10 entries left!). I love learning new foreign languages, can speak Polish, English, German and want to learn Spanish and Japanese next. I really like baking delicious treats for my friends when we meet together for hangouts or board games. I have a growing stack of books to read but struggle to find time to read them. My pronouns are she/her.

BBC’s main mission is to educate, inform and entertain, and those are the core principles of every job we complete. My team’s main focus is websites (including their mobile views on your phones or tablets), specifically live pages. They are pages where you have constantly updated ‘live stream’, where new posts created by editorial (journalists) appear every minute or so (depending on the event). The topics range from elections, to football match going live, Glastonbury to even Springwatch. We work as a team, and have different kind of professionals work on this project – software engineers (coders, like me), testers (who verify our new features and changes work and don’t break the website), UX (user experience) designers (they decide what the features will look like), project managers (they ensure we work efficiently as a team and have no distractions from current tasks), product managers (they pick the next priority jobs for us, what needs doing next) and business analysts (they break down those tasks for us and act as a bridge between the team and product managers/business people).

Sometimes we have grand plans but not enough time to complete them. For example last year when Premier League was happening, we wanted to introduce a brand new kind of results table. Due to time constraints and other top priority projects, we only had the very minimum of what we wanted ready before the first main match kicked off. Rather than give up though, we worked during the competition and by mid-season, we had the whole feature ready, with users being happy with the new options!

I typically start work at 8AM so that I can finish at 4PM. I check e-mails, tasks for the day/week, start coding. At 10AM my whole team has a meeting called ‘stand-up’, where we update each other on what we’ll be doing and how (either solo programming or in pairs, with other software engineers/programmers or testers, designers, etc). Then I spend the rest of the day fixing, improving or adjusting BBC websites. My team mainly takes care of BBC Sport websites (where you can see football match scores, articles about olympics, etc) and any live pages (for example live-updated websites on elections, news or sport events). We also conduct many meetings to discuss designs and decide together over any current issues. Unlike what you can see in films and television, programming isn’t ‘hacking’ and doesn’t take only 5 minutes. A task can vary from a simple single code line change to entirely new module (feature) being written. The actual work also includes planning, designing, coding and finally testing the product before we release it LIVE to the audience (our users). It is very satisfying however to then see things I have implemented (even as simple as a button) being used by people in the public. Being a software engineer is a convenient and flexible job as I all I need for it is my work laptop and charger and can technically work from anywhere in the world as long as I have the internet connection to communicate with my team!