Starting a new job remotely is pretty much the norm these days. In March of 2020, I couldn’t have imagined I would work at home for over two years. Back then, I
was accustomed to mostly working in the office, so switching to five days a week at home took some getting used to. While deciding to make the next step in my career, I valued the opportunity to work remotely full time and by 2021 I had the inclination to stick with it. I soon found myself working for an amazing company, Immersive Labs.
Have you ever wondered who manages Immersivelabs.com, the website you’re reading this blog post on? It’s me! I’m Evander Pierre, a web developer in the Go To Market team at Immersive Labs. I’m responsible for all aspects of our websites: conducting updates, creating new features, improving site functionality, the whole enchilada!
People often believe that once a website is launched, the work is finished – but that’s never the case! We continually create and improve aspects of our sites. The past couple of months have been nothing short of busy with the rollout of our new branding for Cyber Workforce Resilience. We partnered with FINAO Agency to help facilitate this.
Let’s imagine for a brief moment that the Cyber Workforce Resilience project is complete. How does my typical day look? I’ll take you through it.
Our marketing team is split across the world. It’s such a pleasure working with folks from different countries and gaining new perspectives. About 30% of my team is on the East Coast of the United States, like myself, and the rest are spread across the United Kingdom and Europe. You may be wondering how we all communicate across several time zones. Luckily enough, most of our UK folks are only about five hours ahead of most of the team working out of the East Coast. So it makes the most sense to conduct all of our meetings in the morning while the British folks are still online. I love this method because I can crank out some solid work for the majority of my afternoons.
Preparation is key when it comes to meetings. Each morning around 8 AM, I eat my breakfast and take a look at my calendar to prepare for any scheduled meetings. First up is our daily check-in with my team; we mostly catch up and talk about what’s trending on Netflix with a little work chat thrown in. We discuss our priorities for the day and throughout the week to stay aligned on project timelines.
Creating new features on a website is never the sole responsibility of the developer. We have in-house graphic designers that draw up all of the new additions for our website. I then bring these elements to life on your screen. We often meet throughout the week to discuss improvements.
After the check-in meetings, I take a look at our project management tool, Monday, to see if any new website requests have come in overnight. Monday has streamlined the process of keeping all parties up to date with projects. I’ll assess the urgency and decide how much time each piece of work will take me. For big projects, I love allotting time on my calendar to dedicate to a specific task so I can get stuck in.
When lunchtime rolls around, my meetings begin to die down and I can start coding. I find solace in putting on my noise cancelling headphones and opening a code editor. If you ever see me around the office with headphones on and a code editor open, just know something magical is happening! It’s similar to when Kobe Bryant dropped 81 points in ‘06. It’s a zone you just get into, and it’s hard to break.
With Immersive Labs being such a fast-growing company, we use a bunch of tools on our website to make the experience easy for you to consume whatever information you’re looking for. My day winds down with finding areas of improvement and implementing any changes with my manager. We might find a file on the site that links to a 404 error page and supply a redirect for it, or it could even be moving a button to the right hand side of a form in the hope it will increase conversions. But anyway, we can talk about that in the morning in our next team check-in meeting.
