A day in the life of Mapbox Unity engineer, Morgane Santos
By: Morgane Santos (obviously)
Morgane Santos is an engineer on the Unity team at Mapbox. She designs and builds location-based AR (augmented reality) demos. She’s been at Mapbox for 3 months; before that, she worked as a designer and web developer for several years.
6:30 am
Wake up. I love getting up early and consider myself very much a morning person. I make some tea, hang out with my cat Ripper (aka, Lil Rip), read my 3D math book, and make a warm quinoa breakfast bowl for breakfast. I like to have a lot of time for myself in the morning, and it’s a while before I check email or Slack.
If my team has an 8:30 am meeting (shoutout to international teams!), I usually take that call from home. Otherwise, I’m out the door between 8:30–9:00 am.
9:30 am
I’ll take BART to work, which only takes 20 minutes door-to-door. When I get to the office I’ll make some more tea, check Slack, check email, check GitHub. I keep a todo list in Dropbox Paper which I update every day, based on everything I just checked. This is helpful since I might have ~4 projects I’m juggling at any given moment (creating a demo, interviewing users, designing art for a blog post)… which means there’s not really a “typical day” for me!
10:00 am
Sometimes I have a lot of meetings. Sometimes I run a few user tests to get feedback on changes we’re making to our SDK. Sometimes I spend my morning drawing vectors in whatever notebook I have lying around (usually a Moleskine), trying to solve a 3D math problem (aka, the reason I have that book). Sometimes I’m refactoring and dealing with bugs; sometimes I’m coding new features for an AR demo.
NOON
I don’t miss lunch under any circumstance. I love food and eating. I might have lunch with coworkers or friends in the neighborhood — we usually get some Chipotle and, if it’s sunny, eat at Yerba Buena Park. I might eat lunch alone while reading a book. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about Greek and Roman history. I highly recommend SPQR if that interests you!
1:00 pm
Much like my mornings, my afternoons are by no means typical. I usually meet at least once a day with members of my team or our product manager to talk about the status of various projects and do some design thinking of possible new features. Our team is unique in that a lot of our work is experimental: we’re trying to push the boundaries of AR and see what’s possible with it. Mapbox gives us a lot of freedom to try new things, which is truly amazing.
Lately a few of us have been working on a demo for GDC (Game Developers Conference), where I was able to control the design and all my “far out” ideas were supported. People here are willing to take risks, which makes the work even more exciting.
I’m also an organizer for Mapbox’s gender minority ERG (employee resource group), and afternoons are when we host office hours. Office hours give everyone at Mapbox a chance to learn more about gender minority issues or talk about what’s moving at the company to make it more inclusive.
Last but not least, I’m an active members of #sf-cookiers, a channel for SF folks who want to take a walk in the afternoon to go get cookies 🍪.
5:30 pm
This is usually when I leave work. I might go to the gym, or just head home on Muni light rail — it’s more scenic than BART and the longer commute home gives me more time to read (I read a lot), listen to music, or stare into space a little bit.
6:00 pm-bedtime
I’ll usually put on a record and make dinner as soon as I get home. I’ve been listening to Mndsgn’s Body Wash a lot lately; very funky, mellow album, and part of our small (but growing!) vinyl collection. Most nights before going to bed, I’ll watch “King of the Hill” with my boyfriend, which is a truly great way to end the day.
Interested in joining Morgane at work? Take a look at our career pages for chances to meet her (or maybe one day Lil Rip) + check out #sf-cookies.
Morgane on hanging out with her cat Lil Rip and the freedom to push the AR boundaries at Mapbox was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.