What Is A Typical Day In The Life Of A Web Developer?

8.45am  I spend about 45 minutes sifting through my emails and Slack messages.. I’ll
then check for errors and bug reports to see if any issues cropped up while I was gone,
and prioritize my to-do list accordingly.

9.45am  Each morning we get together for an hour or so to discuss our weekly sprint
goals. This allows us to make sure we’re on track as a team and to plan the rest of the
week.

10.45am  With the first meeting out the way, I’ll get stuck into my high priority tasks.
This might be something left over from the day before, or an urgent bug that needs
fixing. In the absence of emergencies, I simply make a start on my to-do list.

We do also practice pair programming, so depending on the task at hand, I might sit
with one of the other developers so we can work on it together. This is a fairly common
practice in the web development industry, and basically enables us to pool our
knowledge and brainpower to find the best solutions.
Once I’m done with a task, I submit my code for review. I upload it to the testing server
and to GitHub with a comment on what I’ve done and why, any changes I’ve made and
instructions on how to test it.

1pm  I tend to go out for lunch as I think it’s really important to get out of the office and
interrupt your workflow for a bit.

2pm  At 2pm, we meet with the design team for project handover. They present their UI
designs, walking us through everything, and we can ask questions and start thinking
about how we might translate their designs into code.

3pm Back at my desk, I take the next card from the sprint planning column in Ora and
start the time tracker. The time tracker helps us plan our time more efficiently - we get a
good overview of how much time we’re spending on what, and we can make realistic
estimates for future projects.

5pm I spend the last hour of the day tying up any loose ends and getting ready for
tomorrow. I’ll check the projects that I submitted before lunch to see if they’ve been
reviewed yet. If they have, I’ll go through the feedback and apply all the changes
requested, and then re-submit for further review. I’ll then attend to any bug fixes or
requests from the other developers, and review any code that has been submitted.

6pm Around six, I close my laptop and head home. I generally don’t work overtime
unless there’s something really urgent to deal with. As long as I’ve wrapped everything
up and know what I’m doing the next day, I’m ready to leave on time.

Reflecting on a typical working day, I’d say I spend 50% of my time on project work,
25% in meetings and on general communication, and the remaining 25% working on
immediate requests and bugs. My daily toolkit consists mainly of Ora, a project
management tool, Slack and Gmail for internal communication, GitHub for code
version control, Atom for text editing, Google Keep for note-taking, Zeplin and Sketch
for design hand-off, and Google Drive for anything miscellaneous.
The biggest challenge to my productivity on a daily basis is definitely the ad-hoc
requests I get from other teams. Slack can be really distracting, but it’s also a
communications tool we just couldn’t do without. It’s important to manage other
people’s expectations and to balance the act of responding to urgent error reports, and
knowing when to shut yourself off and focus on the larger projects.
Finally, I wouldn’t be nearly as effective at my job if I didn’t like our product. Being
passionate about what the company does keeps me motivated from day to day: I go to
work each morning knowing that what I’m working on has a direct and visible impact. I
can see things improving as a result of my work, and that’s really satisfying.