Typical daily life of a web developer

Arrive at the office early, around 8am. Make a cup of tea or coffee and feed the fish. Turn on my monitor. I leave my PC running. The statistic for how much of my life is spent waiting for Windows to boot, is just as scary as the famous statistic of the percentage of our life spent asleep. At least I can influence the former more easily. I check through my emails binning any spam. Look to see if any of the sites we maintain have mailed system errors, or if any users have filed bug reports. We always fix bugs as a priority over creating new code. With new code you have a specification to work to, and therefore, have a good idea of how long it's going to take. A project manager's dream. Bugs are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. Therefore, it could take five minutes, or all day, to track down the offending code and fix it. A project manager's nightmare.

Switch to Firefox web-browser and check my personal web-mail and any new posts in the technical forums that I am registered with. Make another hot beverage. Hmm... hot chocolate today I think. Finally, fire up the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice. In my case this is either Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005. Time to start squashing bugs. How this goes generally sets the mood for the rest of the day. When the bugs are not hiding the feel good factor is high. You feel your day is going to be productive with lots of time hacking new code and designing flashy layouts. When the bugs have gone to ground and the day starts to run out of hours, it does not feel quite so productive. There is the brief satisfaction of having hunted down and squashed a nasty. But, you can't sit back and admire a fixed bug like you can a new three column layout with animated links.

On a good day, bug squashing is over before lunch time. This leaves a little time to surf the Internet. There is some really strange content on the information super-highway. Other content of interest are technical articles written by my peers on the latest up and coming technologies, or new versions of existing frameworks and tools. Now it's the lunch hour. Someone takes orders around the office and scoots off to Starbucks or Nero's to get some proper coffee.

The afternoon hopefully involves the best part of the job. Now I get to exercise my creative talents. This is the part I like the best and the reason I am a web-developer. This is when it doesn't feel like a job and I'm happy as a sand-boy. It's 5:30pm before I know it, time to check my work into source control. depending on how I'm feeling mentally and whether other commitments permit I may leave now or push through to 6 or 7. Occasionally, when a project has slipped particularly badly we may go to stupid o'clock. Mondays are usually an early finish to get to the squash courts.