A day in the life... of a web developer!

Thought it was about time we wrote a blog about something personal... after not a lot of thought we decided to pick on our New Media Director Graham Cartwright and task him to record a typical day for him here at GeekyCreative.

6:30am Alarm goes off and before I am able to come round the kids are awake and bouncing on the bed.

7:30am Kids are dressed and fed and ready for school. I turn on the laptop, check my emails and catch up on Twitter. First coffee of the day while I browse a few sites and generally potter around.

8:30am Emails sent and Tweets replied to it's time to walk the eldest to school. The return walk is valuable time to think and re-adjust my planning for the day. I juggle a few things in my head as I take in the fresh air. I grab another coffee on the way to my desk.

9:00am Back in front of the screen and it's time to fire up 6music and zip through any amends from the previous day. Doing them now means I can keep a project moving with the right momentum.

10:06am Coffee.

10:30am First conference call of the week, This ones an update on a HUGE social networking development that we have on the go. Client seems happy enough, pushing for completion which is encouraging.

11:30am Conference call finished, time for a cofeee while I type up my notes up for an email response. I feel as if I haven't got time but I know that I need to stay on top of the paperwork on a development of this size.

12.00noon Need to spend an hour or two designing some new page layouts for new client pitch. I tend not to spend too much time on designs in pitches as clients like to change them once we get the go ahead and a full brief. However, I do like to give a little bit of creative input at the pitch stage to help balance all the technical stuff in the proposal. I sketch first on pen and paper and then transfer to a sketchy illustrator template to send to client... I've got a colour pallet down and some typefaces at this point so client has a good idea of what's in store. I'll work up the designs in Photoshop if we get the order.

12:26am Coffee.

2:00pm Ploughing through some amends to our bespoke C# admin section that allows clients a lot of control over their websites. I've added in some jQuery code which allows clients to re-order items such as news articles and products.

2:01pm Coffee.

4:00pm Taking a break from all that code with a spot of research and development on the new iPhone SDK. Looking into what's possible for a long standing client. Fair bit of reading involved and nearly an hour on Google.

4:54pm Coffee.

5:30pm Home time for some, but I'm setting up some back ups to run on a new development machine. Don't want to lose all that new code, let alone the new Access and MySQL databases that are running on there. I use Tortoise SVN and some free software from BackUp4All.

5:31pm Coffee.

6:04pm About time I got something to eat. Haven't had any lunch today and drunk far too much coffee (again) but up-to-date with all my scheduled tasks. There's no excuse when working from home but sometimes I get too distracted to eat. Anyway dinner smells nice, time to leave work behind for a bit and grab some family time.

8:00pm Kids in bed, time to crack on with GeekyCreatives new website. Needs to be ready for our official re-launch next week. Need to nail this Google Blogger API and then get the Twitter API on multiple pages. More Visual Studio and C# for me tonight.

10:30pm Shattered and starting to get all coded out... going to see whats on BCC iPlayer and then call it a night. Zip through some Tweets, replying to some SEO and API questions before finally thinking enough is enough. Toodlepip.