I’m coming up on 20 years of professional web development and I still don’t get it sometimes. I tend to measure myself or view work productivity through the lens of “How much code did I write?” and that does a great disservice to myself and what I do.
There’s a lot more to the job:
- Checking email
- Scheduling calls
- Writing release notes
- Contributing to newsletters
- Documentation (code and otherwise)
- Making spreadsheets
- Demystifying the work I do to teammates
- Clarifying decisions
- Having technical conversations with teammates
- Having non-technical conversations with teammates
- Investigating weird browser behaviors
- Babysitting servers and build processes
- Reviewing PRs
- Manual QA on branch deploys
- Attending meetings
- Attending talks (internal/external)
- Cross-org contributions
- Learning
- Planning
- Dreaming
- Scheming
- Community Ops
- Moving cards across a board
- Reading thru backlogs
- Associating tickets to PRs
- Closing out old tickets
- Reading specs
- Giving feedback on web standards
- Eating lunch
- Taking walks
- Cleaning my home office
These are all aspects of becoming a better web developer. It’s not always about lines-of-code or hours-in-chair. Ideally, we’re all shipping our creations, but sometimes you’re the lead role and sometimes you’re a supporting role. A lot of the work is immeasurable, but it all counts towards something. So… self, don’t be so hard on yourself.
