First remote job, leading a team, learning SEO | 2021 review from a web developer

This was a pretty big year for me. While my personal life didn’t change a lot because of the pandemic, my professional life changed quite a lot. I got my first remote role, got involved more in management and met lots of talented people. I don’t remember each moment, but I do have some highlights for the year that I want to go through in this post.

Work update

I joined Gfinity in December 2020 so this year I finished my first full year at Gfinity. My experience has been pretty good so far. We have a great team of talented developers from around the world. The team that I’m working on is small, so we’ve had a chance to get to know each other pretty well. I like the fact that my team can run at a startup speed without a rigid bureaucratic management team. Yet, we don’t have to constantly worry about raising money. We have a flexible remote working culture that has allowed me to improve my work-life balance.

Some notable moments for me at gfinity so far include:

• Being able to manage a team for the first time in my career.
• Architecting a new platform (Manifold) to power the sites in our network.
• First time working with SEO and Ads. It was challenging, but the experience of working with them has made me a better developer.
• Learning more about improving site performance. A huge part of my job was improving the performance of the sites in our network.
• Being able to improve my project management skills. This was the first time I had to actually go in-depth with project management. There are still some that I need to improve on, but I’ve made good progress in this part of my skill set. I still have a love-hate relationship with click up (our project management tool).

Accomplishments

These are the things that I’m most proud of in 2021:

• First time leading a team of developers.
• Architecting the manifold platform that will power all our sites going forward.
• Being able to contribute to the decision-making process as well instead of only working on tech features.
• Improving the project management process for my team.
• SEO improvements made to the Gfinity Digital Media sites (ended the year at 15.5 monthly unique users).
• Performance improvements made to the Gfinity Digital Media sites (went from sites loading MBs of only JavaScript and 800KB of compressed HTML to 600 KB for all resources including HTML, JS, CSS, images and fonts). We’re also close to getting a green CWV score on all the sites using our manifold platform.
• Migrated two sites from WordPress and a legacy CMS over to the new manifold platform.
• Kept a consistent deployment schedule for almost the entire year.

What next

It has been an eventful year, but I expect 2022 to be even bigger. These are the things I’m most excited for in 2022

• Growing the GDM network (more sites, more traffic, more revenue).
• Process improvements — I want to further optimize our tech precesses like sprint planning, CI/CD, automated testing, etc.
• Re-architechting manifold — the first version of manifold has served its purpose well. Now we need to update it to fit the current requirements of the network.
• Focusing on writing high quality tests for the most important parts of the network.
• Growing the GDM community — only having high traffic is not enough. We should be aiming to have a more engaged user base and strive to provide more value to our users.
• Writing more posts — There are lots of topics like SEO, web performance, CSS, project management, debugging, UI/UX,etc that I’m interested in. I’m hoping to write about them a lot more this year.

Wrapping up

It has been a crazy challenging year in which I got to grow quite a lot in my role. Special shoutout to Mike Stevens, Eric Ping and Dominc Needler at Gfinity who believed in my capabilities and trusted me to lead the amazing GDM tech team (Vlad, Raymond, Victor). On a personal note, I am looking forward to writing more and building more cool stuff in 2022. Happy new year, everyone!