To celebrate International Women’s Month — a celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women — Webcollage has gone behind the scenes of its rich product content publishing platform to showcase a day in the life of one of its team of developers.
Please describe your job:
I’m a web developer in the R&D team in Tel Aviv. My job includes developing new features for our clients, both vendors and sites, and solving bugs and problems that occur on the runtime part of our system.
Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?
I’m a member of a two-man Runtime team which is part of the R&D Department in Tel Aviv. We report to Lior Shermo, the Head of the Department.
What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?
Most importantly, you need to be perceptive. There’s always something to learn, problems to solve and not much time for the task, so being able to understand things fast is essential. On top of that, a capability to learn things by yourself is also a must. Communication skills are important as well, as we often collaborate with other teams, either for working on a project, sharing ideas about the best way to implement a project or for solving a bug.
Tell us about a typical working day…
Well… being a typical Brit – my day starts with a cup of tea. My everyday work usually consists of attending to project meetings, working on developing features and solving any bugs that can pop up or are detected by our QA or support team or by our clients.
What do you love about your job? What aspect of it is the most challenging?
The most exciting part of my role is to develop new features. It’s really satisfying to be at the forefront of Webcollage’s innovation and to see the feature you participated in developing, and ultimately come to life on real websites. Since our content is displayed on hundreds of websites, it’s always a challenge to build a content in a way that will provide the same high standard experience for all our users.
What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?
The team and I aim to deliver our projects with a transparent, but light touch. Ideally the client shouldn’t even realise we are there, working way and they just enjoy the smoothest experience possible. We measure success projects by assessing our capability to tackle the challenge with the least “issues” possible, by delivering the project on time or even ahead of time. By bringing innovative solutions and a creative approach. We are encouraged to keep learning and to gain an extensive knowledge of innovative web technologies.
What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?
Ah, that would probably be my brain… and good old fashioned team work. That and Stackoverflow.com.
How did you get started in the digital industry, and where might you go from here?
I’ve been interested in programming and website developing since I was in elementary school, and my parents encouraged this interest by surrounding me with all sorts of programming books. So basically, it was natural to me that “when I grow up” I want to be a programmer.
Do you have any advice for people who want to work in the digital industry?
You need to enjoy learning, being able to study by yourself, as you’ll always going to meet new technologies and to tackle new types of problems you need to solve. You must to know how, and most importantly, to like working with other people and share knowledge, as this interaction is a key element for sparking new ideas and finding solutions to problems.
