I have tried for 20 years to get into coding, and among adhd and having 10 million other projects going on, just could never get it beyond absolute basics and knowing some differences between languages.

Now it seems every tutorial I see is really just clicking around in a gui. Very little actual typing of code, which is the part I actually find cool and interesting.

So my question is, since everyone on lemmy is a programmer, what do you guys actually do? Is it copying and pasting tons of code? Is it fixing small bugs in Java for a website like “the drop down field isn’t loading properly on this form”?

I just dont get what “a full stack developer sufficient in sql and python” actually does. Also i dont know if that sentence even made sense!

  • BigBenis@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    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.

    • anarchyrabbit@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      I think your last paragraph is crucial. Throughout my career in technology. I have met a lot of smart engineers. But understanding the business and the dynamics there of is often not considered by a lot of people. This I believe is also a scale and becomes more relevant the larger the organisation is.