As a Developer at Venn, Mike’s day is full of variety: building integrations, solutioning for clients, and collaborating on team projects.
After dropping off my son at school, I head into work. Once I get to the office, I grab a coffee and a Rice Krispies Treat (breakfast of champions) and then sit down at my desk to go through my schedule for the day. Typically, I have a few meetings throughout the day, so I spend my morning planning what tasks I can make progress on in between those meetings.
A typical day for me includes building out workflows and integrations. Right now I’ve been working on a Slack to Salesforce integration. When I’m not deep into the developer work, I’m meeting with a few of our clients who have service requests. Those calls usually come with a lot of questions, so it’s my responsibility to coordinate with the team and provide a solution for them.
I use a variety of tools in my role. We use ClickUp to help everyone stay organized and keep track of all of our tasks. Slack is the team’s go-to communication app. We use it to collaborate with internal and remote team members. Two of our developers are remote, so we use Tuple so we can take control of each other’s screens. It’s kind of like Zoom, but having that ability to control the screen makes collaborating on projects easier.
I was actually not always a developer. This is a career change for me. I worked many years in banking and insurance. I’ve always noticed how the tech industry is always accelerating and changing every day, so I decided I wanted to be in on the action too.
My journey to becoming a developer started with a coding boot camp. Prior to that, I never considered myself to be a huge tech guy, but I enjoy learning new things and wanted to challenge myself to try something new. Over the course of a year, I obtained a bunch of certifications in AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and all kinds of different technologies.
Before landing my role at Venn, I had applied to a thousand different jobs. When I found Venn, I was intrigued by the company’s marketing and how they featured the team on the website and across social media. It just looked like a fun place to work.
One thing that worried me about being a developer was the idea of me sitting in a dark room by myself coding all day. I’m more of a social person, and fortunately I’ve gotten the opportunity to socialize pretty frequently while working at Venn. We take plenty of time to have fun and interact with each other as a team—like on Fridays we have this thing called “Roll Call” where some members of the team get together for a game of Mario Kart or Jackbox.
I love how every day is different and my responsibilities vary. A lot of developer roles out there require you to work on a single thing, and I imagine that would become stale at a certain point.
Surprisingly, it’s easy to explain what I do to others. I just say I build integrations between systems to help other businesses focus more on what they’re best at. My work helps others take tedious tasks out of their day-to-day—and my family fully understands what that means with their experience working in insurance. When I worked in insurance myself, things were not automated. So, my role now focuses on introducing business automation to people who can greatly benefit from it.
Outside of work, I love spending time with my family. I’m one of the coaches for my kids’ soccer team. I enjoy helping others learn and grow, so I always look forward to teaching the kids at their practices. Cooking is also something that is very therapeutic for me. I love exploring new recipes and trying to make things from scratch with fresh ingredients. I’m also into sports. I keep up with baseball a lot—my favorite team is the Dodgers—and sometimes I enjoy playing golf.