Behind every successful company are dedicated and talented individuals who drive progress and growth. Our employee spotlight series is all about introducing you to the exceptional members of the Reveel family. Get to know their unique backgrounds, discover their contributions, and gain a deeper understanding of the culture that makes Reveel a remarkable place to work.
1. How would you summarize what you do?
I write a lot of code, but more importantly, I coordinate with all kinds of teams at Reveel. I do my best to help everyone discover and remember what our code should do, what it actually does, and why.
2. What makes you want to stay at our organization?
Reveel respects their employees and treats us well! I know that I’m not just part of a business machine here. The people I get to work with are fantastic; they know my name, they respect my thoughts and my time, and they care about me, whether things are going great or whether times are tough.
3. What do you like about our company culture?
I love how much Reveel’s culture respects the fact that we’re all people with real lives outside of work. We work hard, but more than that, we work together! We don’t expect each other to sacrifice our health or times of rest in order to meet deadlines, rather we have a culture of partnership and understanding, where we’re ready to jump in and help one another out so nobody has too heavy a load.
4. Can you tell us a few details about your favorite part of your job?
My very favorite part of my job is when I get to find and stay in focused flow for a long time. It’s so satisfying how much I can accomplish in these moments! When all the questions about requirements and behavior have been answered, when there are no meetings on the calendar, when I’ve eaten an early lunch, and I can just crank up some music and let go until the end of the day, without having to stop to talk to anyone… nothing feels quite like it, and I almost always surprise myself with how much progress I can make in one of those sittings!
5. What does your daily routine look like?
Every morning, I hit the snooze button even though I know I shouldn’t, drag myself out of bed, and make coffee and breakfast. I’m no morning person, so this is easily my least favorite part of the day. But once breakfast and coffee have woken me up, I go to my home office, sign on to our team Discord server, and pull up our project board to plan out my day. I might follow up on in-progress tasks from the previous day at this time, but my day really picks up after our daily standup meeting — the slot after standup is when we have meetings about architecture or overall approach, and it’s often in that slot that I meet with other teams at Reveel to share knowledge, plan future features, or gather information needed to fix bugs. Shortly after lunch, I take my dog out for a brisk walk around the neighborhood, so that we both get a good dose of fresh air and sunshine every day. Once I’m back at my desk, it’s time for my most productive hours; I try to keep a solid block of time to focus on coding in the afternoon and into the evening. After work, my wife and I eat dinner together and catch up about how our workdays went, and then take some time to relax by playing games (we love all kinds: video, board, card, tabletop RPG—you name it) or watching TV. At some point in there I do the house chores too (usually), before we’re ready to start it over again!
6. Tell us the most significant project you’ve handled and how it has impacted our company?
For me, it often feels like our platform has been one massive project ever since I started on it! But if I were to think about recent significant endeavors, I’d have to go with a prototype I had the privilege of creating recently. It was an experiment, serving as a proof-of-concept for a new technology we were considering using to calculate shipping costs faster and more efficiently. Ultimately, the prototype proved our hypothesis false, but that possibility was why we ran an experiment in the first place! I learned a ton creating it, and the technology I got to experiment with has already proven useful in other places in our software, even though it wasn’t cut out for the application we thought it was. It makes me excited to work at a company where we can run experiments like this using bleeding-edge tools, where we aren’t stuck in our own way of doing things, but are ready to adapt and make use of new tools and methods as they become available.
7. What things stood out for you about our management team?
More than any other place I’ve worked, Reveel’s management team does the best at identifying, understanding, and fulfilling their purpose toward all the different groups of people Reveel interacts with. By that I mean, Reveel is not only beholden to our customers to do what we promise (though that is crucial!) — it’s also obligated to show partnership and empathy to its employees, company partners, everyone we interact with. Too often a company will prioritize the needs of its bank account above the needs of its employees or even its customers, but I’ve never seen a company balance and honestly fulfill all of these obligations as well as Reveel.
8. Which company values resonate with you the most?
All of them are important to me, but the ones that resonate most strongly with me are transparency and partnership. The way I see it, a lack of honesty and clarity would undermine any expression of our other values, so transparency is one of the most important. And partnership is my personal favorite because of how much more enjoyable it makes it to work with not only my coworkers, but our company partners and customers as well.
9. What’s the best advice you can give to someone who wants to work for us?
Be honest and forthcoming with your thoughts! If you have a question about why we do something, or an idea for how we can do things better, or if a person or process is causing you trouble, then tell someone! We want to work together and to be well aligned with each other, so you should be ready to be honest and collaborative, so that we together can make Reveel a place that works for all of us.
10. What motivates you?
My biggest motivations are the people I care about; in this context, my family and my coworkers come to mind first. For my family, I want stability and the chance to be present, not to have work siphon my whole life away. For my coworkers, I want to build awesome software for Reveel, so that we can be empowered to help others, to be an industry-wide force for transparency, and to enjoy our work together.
Connect with Jonathan Ming on LinkedIn
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