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187

What do all you coders actually do? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 day ago by bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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!

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[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think you need to start a project, accept it will be slow and painful, and don't become an expert before you start, just use the skills you have and see where they take you. The only thing that matters in software is that it works. The definition of working changes over time, but get that first working version and you will keep going.

[–] laranis@lemmy.zip 3 points 18 hours ago

This is it. I've never been able to learn a new programming language looking at tutorials. I always start with a problem (use case) and build from there. A basic knowledge of concepts like loops, conditionals, and passing/returning values in a function are the building blocks. Eventually you start to get tired of copy/pasting code so you find things like abstraction and inheritance. Then you'll find ways to optimize or use someone's library of premade functionality instead of starting from scratch.

And if you get really, really good you start writing things from scratch again in unique and highly optimized ways. Those are the really fun projects, imo, but not the ones that pay.