As a new(er) mom, my days look a little different than they used to, and not just because I work part-time now! Welcome to my life as a remote consultant - mommy style.
My day usually begins between 5:30am and 6am. This is when my all-natural alarm clock wakes me… It's Carlo! Sometimes I get to sleep in until 7am because every other day my husband grabs the first hour of Carlo time.
Luckily my son is pretty cute, so it's hard to be annoyed by the early wakeups! Once he's up, it’s food time, then some playtime. Right now, this means he's constantly moving. Crawling, walking, cruising, wiggling… this kid never stops moving! Our dog Pepper loves to join in, and I can already tell they will be best friends for years to come.
Could they be any cuter?!
Around 7, it’s time to get ready for daycare. Carlo and I get dressed, and he usually comes out looking way more put together than I do. Once everything is pulled together, we put the coats on, and off to daycare, we go. Thank goodness for our daycare app, because even though I miss him during the day, they send regular updates and even pictures to get us through!
He's too cool at daycare
Once I've dropped off Carlo, I usually go home…. But since it's Friday, that means Starbucks and croissants!! Thank god for coffee, because Carlo kind of sucks at sleeping, especially when it's my night with the monitor. Conveniently, there is a Starbucks .3 miles from daycare, and just down the road from that is an absolutely amazing French bakery that even more conveniently takes their croissants out of the oven shortly before I arrived. There are few things better than a freshly baked croissant. My husband always requests the chocolate-filled one, but I switch between almond or spinach-feta filled myself.
Once I'm home, I have some time to myself to enjoy my coffee (and sometimes a second cup of coffee) and my breakfast. Part of CT's year-end gift this year was an ember mug, and I am HOOKED. Perfectly hot coffee for hours?! You better believe I transfer my Starbucks into the Ember mug.
Starbucks + Stanley = Basic and I love it
Around 9, it’s time to get to work! I usually take the first 30 minutes to go through emails, update any tickets I'm working on, and plan out what I'm going to be working on for the day. Today I'm working on ingesting some data we already have from a new version of the api. This new api came just in time, as it's wildly more efficient, and the old one keeps crashing our ETL tool. I finished the ETL process yesterday, and now it's time to transform the json data into an understandable view for our users with the help of dbt!
I start by grabbing the first record of the data to get the available column headers from the table in Snowflake and paste those into a text editor to manipulate. I prefer to use sublime, but I won’t lie I mostly likely it because it has a black background and if I set the file type to sql the text is pretty colors. Part of this process today involves comparing the available data fields to the existing data set from the old api that is currently in production. Unfortunately for me, there are some fields missing! After far too long repeatedly querying the data and comparing the api's data dictionary to my own data, I realized not every record has the same fields. Gross. Luckily a quick Google search leads me to the snowflake function 'object_keys' and I can grab all the data fields showing up!
Now that I've got all the fields, I can finish mapping the new fields to the old fields. From there, I write a query in Snowflake that transforms the json data into a standard table view while putting the fields in the same order with the same names as the old one, so the transition will be as seamless as possible for our users.
Then it's lunchtime!!! Sometimes it's a hastily made sandwich (how did I survive 9 months without deli meat?!), others time I've managed to meal prep, and I've got a well-rounded extra tasty meal, and sometimes I haven't managed to grocery shop and it’s a Kind bar and whatever other random snacks are left in the pantry. I've reached a good stopping point with the code, so I'll actually step away from the computer, and enjoy sitting in the sun in the world’s comfiest chair.
What do you mean you don’t eat surrounded by toy cars?!
Once I'm done, it’s back to the query! Now it's time to use Azure dev ops and dbt to deploy the view I wrote. With some quick changes to how I refer to tables in the query, and a test run (imperative when you forget commas as much as I do), I am pushing the new view to our test pipeline for my team to review and eventually merge to master. Once we merge to master the view will be available for the client to review and test, and hopefully in another week I'll be able to decommission the old api and save our client some time and stress.
While this Friday was very code heavy, other times I'm working in pbi, dragging and dropping in our etl tool, or meeting with clients about various projects. No day is the same!
When all is well (looking at you cold and flu season…), I work about 4 hours a day. Once I'm done working, there's still a laundry list (sometimes literally) of work to do!!! The last few hours of my afternoon can involve errands, grocery shopping, cleaning, tracking down the toy cars throughout the house so we don't trip on them, and sometimes just napping!
I'm so thankful for how understanding my CT fam always is, because, with the never-ending stream of daycare bugs, my schedule is all over the place! Some days I can't be on at all, other days just during naptime but I can't get on calls to talk because somehow Carlo hears me through his white noise and closed door and wakes up, and other days I'm attempting to catch up from earlier in the week. With my part-time schedule, I've been able to catch up around the house, catch up on sleep, and even spend some extra time in the kitchen before Carlo gets home to make a nicer dinner.
The crossed-out days are when he actually went to daycare…darn viruses!
This means once Carlo is home, it’s family time! I love when we can end his day by being present and not worrying about work or what needs to get done around the house. We usually only have 1.5 to 2 hours of time together between daycare and when he falls asleep, and dang do I miss him during the day!! And just like the morning it's all about following him around as he explores and works on walking… soon to be running (yikes). Around 6:30, he goes down to bed and he is exhausted by then! Then my husband and I can spend time together before our nightly discussion of "How early is too early to go to sleep?" Who knows what will happen tomorrow exactly, but maybe Carlo will surprise us and sleep through the night, or at least sleep past 6am!
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