Day in a life of a web developer – Josh Taylor

My day usually starts at some point between 5-6 am, with my 1-year-old daughter sitting on my head.

If I’m getting up with Lucy, we’ll go downstairs, feed our dog Casper, and have breakfast. If I’m not getting up with her, my wife Kira will take her for the first one or two hours of her awake time, at which point she will let the dog up, who also jumps on my head.

After we’re all up and awake, I’ll have a quick shower and start work between 8.30-9. At around 9/10, I’ll take the dog for a walk in the forest nearby for around an hour or so.

Over the summer months, we had to start taking him earlier in the day, because it was too hot for him at 10 am. It’s nice to get some fresh air at the start of the day.

My work day normally starts with checking emails and responding to some Slack messages.

Then I’ll start work on the main project I’m currently working on, up until around 12.30/1, when I’ll have a half-hour break for lunch. I normally eat at my desk whilst watching some YouTube or Netflix.

At 2 pm we have our all-hands meeting, where I’ll update the team on what I’ve been working on. 

After the 2 pm all-hands, I might do some retainer work. This generally involves checking the relevant Trello boards for incoming cards or doing general maintenance, e.g. (updating plugins or updating composer dependencies).

Then I’ll carry on with the main project up until around 6 pm, which is usually when dinner is ready.

Once every other week I’ll look after Lucy on a Friday, as Kira is working.

This means I have to catch up on the hours for that day throughout the week. I normally do this by working a couple of hours extra each day, either after dinner or after Lucy has gone to bed, or occasionally by working a couple of hours on Saturday.

By moving my hours around like this it means, so far, we’ve been able to avoid paying for child care, and I get a special Daddy-Daughter day every other week, which is really special and is only possible because of Steadfast’s commitment to letting us work flexible hours.