Gaby Marraro works primarily on Loupe, the tool that photo editors use to work with the entire New York Times photo archive, with the goal of making the report more visual and engaging.

8:15 a.m.

I start off most mornings by taking my dog, Goose, to Prospect Parks off-leash hours. Its dog heaven!

9 a.m.

When we get back from the park, I make myself coffee and do Spelling Bee and Wordle, my morning ritual.

9:15 a.m.

I work from my apartment in Brooklyn, so I make my way over to my desk to get started for the day. I always check Slack and my emails first thing. Im on call this week, so I also check our alerts Slack channel and the Loupe feedback tool channel to make sure everything is working as expected.

I have an unusually meeting-heavy day today, so I have to manage my time well so that I still have room to work on my tickets (the tasks our larger projects are broken down into!). We launched Loupe* to the newsroom at the end of 2022, so were now iterating it and prioritizing work in response to user feedback. So much of the journalism we publish relies on visual storytelling through photos. Before Loupe, photo editors were working with a very old system that couldnt keep up with the needs of a modern newsroom. Loupe is a much more resilient tool and was built to be compatible with newsroom workflows.

We have a pretty active Slack channel with the photo editors who use Loupe, and its great to be able to communicate directly with our users. Thats one of the things I love about the Photo team. We also have bi-weekly demo meetings with our stakeholders to update them on any new features and get their feedback.

Were also tackling two other big projects right now: replacing the system used to manage photographers and photo assignments and migrating some of our systems off an in-house inventory and provisioning tool for organizing A.W.S. (Amazon Web Services) resources.

10:15 a.m.

We have standup* every morning with the whole teamengineers, designers and program managers. We go through our list of tickets, give updates, and commiserate about how long the new operating system upgrade is taking to complete on all of our computers.

My manager, Sherry Gao, shares pictures of her new baby on Slack! There are lots of emoji reactions.

10:30 a.m.

Its back to tickets for a while until my next meeting. (I first have to decide which Taylor Swift album Ill listen to on repeat today. Im going with Midnights.)

Today, Im working on a couple of tickets for our photo assignment replacement tool. Im working on fetching all of the photographer assignments from our database to display in Loupe. Im primarily a front-end engineer, so this ticket is getting me out of my comfort zone by working with our database. Our code goes through multiple stages of peer review, from writing it to releasing it. This way, we can be confident that by the time a feature gets released, there wont be any unexpected issues.

Of course, we cant anticipate everything, so we have robust automated alerts so we can be notified immediately if anything in our system is going awry. First, engineers review the code. Then Jenny Hottle, our designer, will do a visual Quality Assurance (Q.A.) check, and Shonta Singleton does Q.A. testing. Our product manager, Kate Harman, does a final product review, and then its good to go. Its now ready to get deployed to production! Kate gives me the go-ahead.

Now I have some time to review a couple of my teammates pull requests before my next meeting.

Noon

I head to my design system working group meeting, where we talk about the launch of version two of the system, which includes a full conversion to TypeScript*. TypeScript is being widely adopted across The Times, because it makes for a more resilient application and a better developer experience. It was one of our most requested features. (P.S.: We successfully launched the following week and were met with lots of excitement across our engineering and product teams!)

1 p.m.

I join our bi-weekly stack chat meeting with the Photo engineers. Its always an open agenda, so anyone can bring in a topic they want to discuss with the group, whether its directly related to in-flight tickets or a more general technical concept. This week, a senior software engineer, Sherman Hewitt, led a discussion about state management in Loupe, which were hoping will lead to a big simplification of parts of our codebase. We aim to balance building new features with making our existing code better.

2 p.m.

Its a marathon day of meetings. This one is another working group, where were redesigning the data structures and algorithms portion of our technical interview process for new hires and replacing it with a code review-style format. Today, we aligned on themes around what types of skills we want to evaluate candidates forcollaboration was a big one.

3 p.m.

Its been a while since Ive taken a break, so I pause for a late lunch.

5:20 p.m.

Time to wrap up for the day after working some more on my tickets for the last couple of hours. I have a little bit of time to unwind before I head to pottery class.

* What does it all mean?

• Loupe: The in-house content management system that hosts the entire archive of Times photos
• Standup: Part of agile development, a daily meeting at which the team gives status updates on in-flight work
• Typescript: A programming language and extension of JavaScript that helps developers write more reliable and understandable code for building software applications

Editors note: After this was written, Gaby took an interim role as an engineering manager on a newly formed team. She plans to return to working as an engineer in July 2023.

Day in the Life of a Senior Software Engineer on the Photo Publishing Team was originally published in NYT Open on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.