Bex Dunn

6.45 AM 

Alarm goes off. Consider getting out of bed. It’s raining, there is a massive rain band on the radar and I’m feeling sore. Decide not to go running. Read the news instead.

7.30 AM 

Shower, throw on thermals and a tracksuit. Deal with requests from neighbours’ cat to come into the house repeatedly. Make toast and coffee, and sit down at work-from-home desk.

8.30 AM

Sign in. Say ‘hi’ to colleagues, check for urgent messages on wetlands or coding channels, read emails. My Agile Team in Digital Earth Australia is the Wombats, and we cover topics including marine, coastal, mangrove, urban, and wetland and surface water earth observation. I update the team ‘what’s happening in the Wombat burrow’ document to say that today I’m working on some code for stakeholders, have a couple of meetings, and am working on a paper this afternoon. 

9.00 AM

Fire up the Digital Earth Australia Sandbox and reopen the browser with all the tabs (3 screens worth - one with research papers and our team reference manager, one with my daily apps, a music player, and 25 tabs of stack Exchange and our Github repository, and one with collaboration documents and links for upcoming webinars, conferences and workshops on water and/or earth observation).

Put on some loud music, open up my notebook that matches drone and satellite imagery for wetland mapping, and work some code problems in Python.

9.45 AM

Skype call into Team Wombats stand-up. We have a chat about where our heads are at, where we’re stuck and who might want to attend the Women-in-High-Performance computing meetings coming up at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), the High-Performance supercomputer we use in a lot of our work. We organise with our other science team to have a meeting about how the development of a national wet-vegetation classification is going, and share some images of how it’s working for some significant wetlands.

10.00 AM

Put in a pull request to get my code changes into the team repository on github. I get some feedback and include some better pretty pictures of what it’s actually doing. We use satellite data from North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah) to compare with field drone results from our trip in February, so we can use the drone data to develop a model of the amount of water in each satellite pixel. 

11.45 AM

Send out my notes from the LGBTQIA2+ Ally & Leadership training last week, answer some emails. I have some really nice emails from stakeholders in other states about products we’ve sent them, as well as some validation data to read through and respond to.

12.00 PM

Head out for a run around the base of Mt Taylor. Come home, have lunch in the sunshine, and throw the washing in the machine. If I was in at the office today, I’d head out for a walk with my workmates, then have lunch on the balcony with them if I had time

1.00 PM

Make coffee, then call into an online meeting with other agencies and states about using remote sensing data to map wetlands and as an input to model surface water flows. We talk about how we can share our products and data. 

2.30 PM

Hang out the washing, make a cup of tea, then switch to working on our journal paper that we’re publishing on our Wetlands Insight Tool, developed to support the work of wetland managers. Working on papers doesn’t happen all the time, but can be necessary to support product publication for us. My supervisor and I call each other and work on our papers together.

4.30 PM

Take a quick break, make a cup of tea, and answer some queries on our work channel. Take a look at a colleague’s pull requests on GitHub and comment on a new notebook providing an intro to GA’s Landsat satellite collections.  Merge the notebook into our repository for users to use as a reference.

5.00 PM

Head ‘off’ for the day. Say goodbye to colleagues, log out of my computer and head out for a walk around the reserve with my partner. 

6.30 PM

Dinner, then plan some adventures for the weekend kayaking and walking around Canberra. 

9.00 PM

Pack up my computer for a day in the office with my colleagues tomorrow.