The following is a description of what a normal day might look like at Caribou.

Catch Up On What You Missed

Our product & eng team is distributed all over the world, so it’s common for you to wake up and see a massive flurry of activity that occurred while you were sleeping (slack messages, github notifications, etc). This means that the start of the day typically requires catching up on what you missed. Some examples of morning activities include:

• Check your Linear notifications to see if your colleagues require any action on your part, or if your colleagues have responded back to you.
• Maybe you’re working on a proposal for a new system / architecture (real example) and your colleagues have provided lots of async feedback
• The assigned reviewer on your pull request has posted some comments on GitHub and has told you that you can merge after you make the requested changes (you won’t be blocked by their lack of approval if they are sleeping / unavailable)
• Our designer, Rodri, has commented that the current implementation of one of our components is not exactly what is in our Figma project, or is not showing correctly on Safari

Start or Continue On Your Task

There’s always a clearly outlined set of tasks to be done. All tasks are tracked on Linear. We use priority levels on tasks to determine what should be worked on next. This also helps us to de-scope work if we run out of time on projects (low-priority tasks can be called out to be de-scoped by anyone including the engineers working on the project).

The kind of work varies... It can be day-to-day task work that is clearly scoped out, or it can be more ambiguous, research-based work. Our goal is to ensure that engineers are provided with work that fits their preferences (whether that’s front end, back end or devops) as well as their skill level to ensure that we have highly engaged engineers.

Pair With Your Colleagues

It’s quite common to do ad-hoc pairing with colleagues here at Caribou. We strongly believe in pairing as it helps reduce information silo-ing as well as reduce the time it takes to do code review once a functionality is fully implemented.

... also it’s just fun hanging out with each other 😃

Partake in recurring meetings