Right now, I’m upgrading my Nushell plugin in Rust code while not being very familiar with Rust and its mechanisms. I’m using the build errors, cargo crate (libraries) documentation, auto completions/suggestions, existing own and cate/lib source code to find the correct methods and way to do data format transformations. I managed to make it compile again, so now I’ll test-run it. I “accidentally” extended what it can map as well, which is a positive side-effect.

It depends very much on the role I’m in, and what you’re asking in particular. As far as hands-on development work,

• No, I don’t copy tons of code
• I read and/or search and/or analyze and/or remember existing code, to understand what is happening, identify bugs, or embed and write solutions that make sense within the project, reuse existing mechanisms and approaches
• I develop and write solutions, sometimes in one iteration, sometimes through multiple iterations, when I have new findings during development or solution behavior or new questions raised
• When it’s web, it’s more writing, if it’s a Windows Forms app developed with Visual Studio, UI placement and layout is a UI process, but connecting it to and implementing it’s logic and behavior is still a coding task
• I love making use of efficient editor and IDE features like multi-cursor editing when they’re useful
• Overall, I think being in the UI is the smaller part of development

Professional development in general entails much more. I work with my customer and consider their workflows, needs, I discuss and question their requirements, I design solutions both in user workflow, UI, UX as well as in code architecture and implementation. For a long-running project, improving existing code is a large part of what I do when implementing new changes. Documenting what I find out or see and is not documented yet is another big part.

If you feel you never get it beyond absolute basics I encourage you to work on tools, utils, or projects that you use or care about. I wrote various utils for my own benefit and use, and do regular drive-by contributions to projects I find useful or interesting (mostly related to documentation or tech approachable to me).

Don’t just follow tutorials. Set a goal of something that works. Be it a clock, a calculator, a command line tool that let’s you read music file metadata, or starts or stops programs for you. Or whatever you feel might be reasonable to explore and achieve, whether with or without practical use.

Pointless meetings.

Pointless and harmful forced commuting to and from office.

Pointless agile ways of working.

Pointless managers.

Pointless eating expensive lunch.

Pointless learning of frameworks that gets replaced in a year.

Pointless forced team events.

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I am a machine that turns nonsense requirements into nonsense code.

Junior - code Mid - code and meetings Senior - meetings

Unfortunately too little coding and too much random busywork. Updating random documents, fixing small bugs, updating versions in like 4 higher projects to make sure my new feature actually shows up in the final software. But when coding, it’s indeed quite often just adding a random new button or something with all the backend logic as well. And the testing of course.

I’m currently burnt out because we spent months on end doing preparation work, creating all kinds of UML diagrams to prepare for a big rework, only to be put on a different project and do it again. Although I was probably already on my limit before that…

It all sounds a bit negative, but when we’re in the normal flow it’s still mostly just coding and debugging, two things that I do enjoy. Spending a whole week hunting down some obscure bug that only happens in certain conditions sounds like hell to some, but to me it’s like a murder mystery and I love that shit. With complex and large corporate systems there are so many suspects for a bug, it’s a real challenge to uncover the mystery and by the time you find it you’ve learnt a lot about some random part of the application.

I tend to write Java. Many people don’t like Java, and honestly it’s also not a fancy language. It isn’t Rust, Julia, or Haskell, languages that I find very interesting. But at the end of the day I’m not sure I’d pick any of them over Java for building a large application like this. Java is boring because it’s quite well designed for large enterprise work. It keeps people from doing too many flashy things that are understood by no-one. It just works ™. It’s fast enough, has great tooling with Maven, does everything pretty well, has lots of libraries to use, and almost everyone can write it.

Tutorials only explain the concepts, maybe takes you 10% there. The rest is is practical application and applying the methods. You might be able to copy and paste some code but I will bet my bottom dollar that there will be some nuances for your use case that you have to amend manually. Thinking about the logic and how everything connects to each other is often the part that takes the longest and the most challenging.

What I can say is that if you like problem solving, technology is a great drug to get your fix, it is endless.

almost everyone in my area is coding, programming or software engineer, or an physical science engineer, rarely i see people that are researchers in a lab. its hard if you dint start young where you can retain more info. wish i did it before transferring and sticking it out with bio.

There’s a big difference between hobby coding and corporate coding. I do the latter and work on large applications as part of a team. I spend a lot of my time

• Using debugging tools and probing at code to investigate and fix bugs
• Coming up with system architectures to achieve whatever feature we want to add
• Cleaning up my other teammates’ AI generated slop 😑 (fuck AI)
• Writing test suites for our code that guarantee everything works as expected
• Occasionally I write new features
• Juggling this with pointless meetings and a long ass commute that take up 60%+ of my work day

I make e-commerce websites. It’s a lot about making widgets, making logic for connecting to their accounting system and how prices and discounts work together. Then whatever delivery and payment system they need and so on.

I write 90% of the code by hand since it works for me very well.

I work at a mid-tier B2B tech company. I specialize in frontend but am otherwise a full-stack engineer.

My big project over the last two-ish weeks was building a demo environment for one of the company’s products. It involved:

• Updating some configurations in our backend to ensure the database can store the information for the demo sessions.
• Writing a class to represent these demo sessions, acting as an interface between the database and runtime environment.
• Building sets of endpoints so that our products’ frontend can interface with the server.
• Building a system on the frontend that regularly syncs with the backend on the state of the demo session and provides it to the UI.
• Building a pretty UI that shows the user the current state of the demo session and lets them update it.
• Writing unit tests to ensure every individual component of the system works as it’s expected to.
• Manually testing the system as a user to ensure it’s all working together as expected.
• Writing a summary of my work and submitting it for review by my coworkers, discussing and applying any feedback given.
• Deploying my work to production and confirming it’s all still working as expected.
• Praying to every God that there is no bullshit issue I missed somewhere and will have to take accountability for later.

Along the way, I got several other smaller tasks, like updating logic in one of our algorithms, adding internal tooling so that the customer service team can stop bugging engineering to fix things and just do it themselves, hypothesizing on the sources of random bugs and updating documentation. In between all that, I’ve got meetings to discuss random other bullshit.

Still lots of coding, but at this point in my career it’s more about knowing how my company’s systems work together and how to take an idea and turn it into usable software.

My last project is using machine learning to sort data for a company and the flow kinda goes like this:

1. Use the advanced tab in the browser on the UI search pagr for the company to expose the API query for the data I want to have
2. Write some shell script to programmatically call the API for the data I want.
3. Realize that there’s actually a limit to how much data the API can return BUT the metadata says how much there is beyond the limit.
4. Write some script to paginate (scrape over) all that data and save as a JSON file
5. Realize my JSON is badly formatted and some queries are empty, so do some error checking and massage to make it work right.
6. Create a python script to ingest the parts of the saved data I want and write it to a SQLite database. This takes ongoing refinement.
7. Do some sql to count how many entries I got in the time period I was getting data for, and compare to a tool the company has to aggregate said data. It was close enough.
8. Go learn about Jaccard similarity and locality sensitive hashing. Use this to write a script to deduplicate the database so I don’t have a zillion repeated entries. Also python, but it starts with some cursor stuff and sql.
9. Do the actual project which is trying to get some reinforcement learning to label the data automagically. This means I also have to write some methods to get particular mixes of the data I’ve already collected. For example I want my mix to have 50 percent red balls, 20 percent green balls and 30 percent blue balls. How do you pick the right number of balls from the total set? It’s not hard but it takes some thinking.
10. Wrap this thing up in a script that will do some load balancing on a machine with lots of gpus and CPUs so I don’t hog the entire server rack. Submit it and let it cook.
11. Write it again so I can wrap options around it and optimize hyperparameters.
12. Start working up the results to show improvement overall. If it’s better than what the company already has…
13. Time to fire up the old git repo and make sure the commits are clean. Add readme and make files (bc I prefer to deploy with make) and put it in the hands of another engineer who will roll it out for that company.

Idk it’s not a super sophisticated problem but it has a lot of moving parts and you have to kind of tackle them in order. Mostly it’s “hey here’s an obstacle to the end goal, how do I fix it on my own in a smart way?”

Then do it.

Not much.

https://xkcd.com/303

I have adhd and I’m a software developer. We make enterprise software for various clients.

We don’t copy and paste, per se, but we do have common practices and many let’s say functions for simplicity that we will reuse over and over as a lot of enterprise looks similar and just the customer screens change. So we still do a lot of problem solving but if we have already solved that problem before we can use it again.

Currently working with a large transport authority to build a claims tracking system and create a bespoke Sage integration to track payments and receipts. And I’m not that smart dude and I don’t even feel like an adult in my forties.

We offer ongoing support to all our clients and genuinely do what’s right and fair all the time as my boss and the own is an incredible dude and just nice and fair and open.