At the heart of Meltwater Engineering are the employees who find ways to collaborate around the world. In our Spotlight series we will introduce you to new hires as well as veterans from across the organization, and give you insights into their day to day from North Carolina to Hong Kong.
As our second installment, we are happy to introduce Jeremiah Hoyet from our Raleigh, North Carolina office.
Would you like to introduce yourself?
My name is Jeremiah Hoyet and I’m the lead engineer for our web components team here at Meltwater.
What is a web components team?
We are responsible for designing and building the components the other teams in the organization use. A lot of the time we are teaching other teams how to use these tools most effectively, we are pretty much on the bleeding edge of tech when it comes to component use, for example things like custom elements and shadow DOM.
What has your journey at Meltwater been like?
I just celebrated my 7 year anniversary on August 1! When I first joined Meltwater I was a fresh junior and was at the point of my career where I was not sure what my next step should be. I took the job at Meltwater and in retrospect it was a great decision for me because now I’ve gone from a junior engineer to level 5 engineer in the past 7 years, all thanks to the help and support of the people around me. I’ve also had the opportunity to live in two different locations. I currently am in Raleigh, I used to reside in Manchester New Hampshire for 5 years.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Morning
I usually start the day by going over the things that happened offline over the evening. Some of my teammates are in other countries and different time zones so a lot of our work happens asynchronously via github. This then rolls into the daily standup and spending a couple hours with the team, if we don’t have other meetings. We usually sit in a google meet and collaborate together, it’s a great opportunity for people to get help if needed.
One tool we’ve been using a lot lately is VS code live sharing - everyone on the team uses VS code and we just have to share a link. Then everyone will have the ability to make edits. This has been super helpful because instead of trying to talk over each other in the meet we can type directly into the file.
Lunch
Since COVID and working from home in hot Raleigh, I usually will eat a sandwich and read the news in the backyard (now I sound like an old man :)) Or sometimes I’ll play some video games with an old colleague who now lives in Sweden.
Afternoon
After lunch is usually heads down time where the team focuses on coding. We might jump into a google meet, talking things over and try to keep it more of an in-office feeling. It’s nice to be able to just say “help me” in the meet and get immediate help from a teammate, for instance we will help swarm on issues if someone is stuck.
Evening
When it comes to the end of the day, I’ve been pretty stringent about leaving “the office” which happens to be the room where I work and spend my free time (playing video games). I will leave the office, walk away from the screens, and settle dinner and homework with the family. If I don’t take the time away from work seriously, I find that I get pretty burnt out.
Name one thing at Meltwater which you are really proud about?
We started a guild for Front End development at Meltwater. As part of the guild we identified that AngularJS, which was a core technology for Meltwater, would no longer be supported in the coming years.
In order to come up with the best plan to move away from this technology, the guild flew to Gothenburg, Sweden and locked ourselves in a spa to have a really intense discussion about where the front end should go. It was the most stressed I had been about having to make such a large and important discussion.
After the spa we came to the conclusion that we should move forward by using Angular 2+ to develop our component library. Shortly after we realized that it wasn’t the best solution for all the various teams at Meltwater and decided web components might be the way to go. Although we changed our decision, the trip allowed us to build trust and form bonds between the people in our guild so we could openly admit that we needed to change direction.
Afterwards we went to Berlin, Germany and locked ourselves in another room and wrote the beginnings of the custom elements components library, which is what the team I work on now manages.
I’m particularly proud of this experience at Meltwater because we had the ability to fail, learn from those failures, and then come up with a better solution.
What sticks out to you about Meltwater?
Diverse opinions and getting your opinion heard. Using the front end guild as an example, we had a lot of perspectives and opinions from different teams located all over the globe. We were able to express those opinions, reflect on them, and then use them to make the best decisions for our engineering teams. We also had the ability to make those decisions and were trusted to do so from all levels of the organization.
If you are interested in learning more about working at Meltwater - check out our open positions.