Ask Lemmy

Not much.

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 (tm). 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.

Mind i ask what are you trying to archive? At what point would you see yourself as a programmer? When its in your job description? X amount of projects worked on on GitHub?

As an auti-dd I really really like coding and i had a developer job once to discover i absolutely loathed it. I hated having rules and infrastructure that directed me how to code, i hated being told what i could work on. I could not stand having a schedule telling me when to code and from what desk to do it.

The only thing that makes me want to code is to creatively express myself. I no longer accept compromise beyond creative limitations i myself put in place. (Really autistic-pedantic shit sometimes)

My current job description is an IT position that could not be further removed from coding in its description. It also doesn’t challenge me. I don't want it too because now i often have spare free to “improve the functioning of the workplace” which i do by writing scripts and tools that fix common annoyances in our legacy software and save my coworkers plenty of time.

Or in house developer team (who have no time and are to distant from other day-to-day work have expressed confusion why someone like me wants to stay in my role rather then join them but i know i wont be able to continue my side projects and am just going to get assigned to expensive-big-ego-pet-project instead.

I also have plenty of code related projects at home, i lost motivation for those when i was a “real programmer”

I make game mods as a hobby. 90% of the time is taken with deciding what to write, 5% is actually typing, and the other 2500% just seems to vanish without a trace.

Knowing what to type always takes much more time and effort than actually typing. IDE autocomplete has increased this difference further, and AI promises to do this even more (although it seems to increase typing time at the moment).

Sit in meetings

I have never just clicked around in a gui unless its me testing something I'm building. I would suggest finding some better tutorials.

Today I added a few features and fixed a couple bugs.

We have a screen where users can basically click through a list of contacts to send out emails. The list is system generated, and sometimes users want the email to go out to other contacts not on the list. So I added a section to the screen with a typeahead input box to search through all the companies in our system. Once the user selects the company it has to be broken down by branch (region) so I had to build out a small api for getting the company branches and filtering by some criteria to see if they're even eligible to receive these types of email, so with that data returned I generated a drop down to select the branch, from there another api call to generate a list of checkboxes for each contact at the selected branch. Then I had to build out a mysql table to store the additional contacts to email and work that logic into the code that sends out those types of emails.

Right there you have perl, mysql, html, CSS and JS.

Another thing that everyone's gonna lose it for when it goes live but took me no more than an hour. A lot of our accounting pages are historical reports, there's only a few that are updated in realtime, and almost all of them were super slow to load because of all the heavy calculations. I added a couple tables and a cron job to run daily and populate them. So now instead of doing calculations on the fly those pages just pull the data from the db and load instantly.

solving business problems by adding more buttons and input fields that go trough various processing pipes and spawn more infrastructure to compute results nobody needs

Crazy to me that GUI seems to be a major focus in those situations. My IDE is most often pretty minimal, whatever it takes for me to get code on the screen, and unless I'm using the debugger, compiling and running has always been easier using a CLI. It's good practice anyway, familiarizing yourself with the shell, code for your code lol.

I've been developing professionally for almost 10 years now, and started learning very young. The circumstances were different, but I think the principles are the same. Some folks here already mentioned taking on projects that interest you, and I'd definitely agree, provided you keep them small. Something that you'll want to make can keep you motivated, and small wins keep you going. For something full stack, I'd recommend coming up with a CRUD web app (create, read, update, delete) that does something that's fun. Maybe it's a recordkeeper for a sports team, or maybe it's a rudimentary forum. That sentence makes sense, no worries. You can use python to write your backend, see if you can make an API that just handles CRUD requests and builds and runs SQL statements for your database. Then just use whatever you'd like for the front end and call that API. It's still a pretty big project depending on how new you are to this, but it's hard not to be when full stack touches everything. If you're completely new, I'd lay off and pick the front or back end to start with.

I code around 10% of my day. The rest is just meetings about things people want, emails about bugs that occur and small fixes, finding out what network did again and re-doing the automatic syncs again.

Ironically in all my jobs coding is actually one of the smallest/least time consuming things I do. I do much more coding on my own time than at work. And all without AI. Cause AI is silly (and if you dont self host, your coding for Microsoft/OpenAI/Github/etc...etc..).

My suggestion, try to make the smallest MVP possible and just iterate on it. Find a cool game engine? Great! Try to make the character appear on the screen, then do other things. Find a cool library, great! Try to use the library in a small project. It doesn't work for everyone, but it has helped quite a few people. Do what gives you motivation. Or fix something you hate. Hate is an excellent motivation.

Oh, these days?

Nothing.

I tinker around with making a video game, lots of code in that, but no one will pay me even half of what I'm worth, as either a software engineer or db admin or data analyst (or all 3 of those at the same time), and the tech industry's idea of a hiring process is an actual sadistic joke, invented by morons, run by idiots.

The tech industry is largely imploding because most of the competent people have been gaslit and forced out by abusive idiots with MBAs who do not know how to code and have now convinced themselves that if they convert the entire economy into destroying the world with AI datacenters, in an effort to make code that can code itself, well then they win, somehow.

I'm retired now but I used to copy and amend shit from Stack Overflow.

The best way to get into coding is to surround yourself in it by switching to linux and starting to program your own desktop interfaces (can be through browser too). Once you live in your own software the surface area for motivation is significantly higher so you actually learn stuff. Come up with ways to automate what you do and don't be afraid to fail.

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.

I send out resumes to job openings that claim to be entry level, only to be shot down because they want five years of experience in a technology that came out two years ago.

I'm a glorified data analyst. Almost all my work is done with a single database using a narrow range of commands and SQL queries. I memorized the syntax for stuff I use regularly and just type it out every time.

No I do not want to write a bunch of macros. No I do not need an AI assistant. What I need is for all these "helpful" tools and popups to get the fuck out of my way. I've been typing typing typing since AOL Instant Messenger.

I am not a programmer, but I did code something from scratch.

I started with a simple idea, I wanted a bot that can chat on twitch.

I did tons of research, applied for a key from twitch, finally got it to log into chat with the most basic of sample code.

Then I started to make commands for it. Added one by one over about a year.

Then the real challenge was getting the code to do math for people in chat: change temperatures between F and C, doing calculations for the blood moon on 7 days to die, and other stuff like that. Eventually I got all that working but it took a ton of trial and error.

The parts I couldn’t get working yet are getting my code to talk with a SQL database and commands so people can add and remove the bot from their channels themselves. Not sure I will ever finish it since I no longer run a server 24/7 now that I’m offgrid.

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.

I simply started programming before there were GUIs. That helped a lot. Another thing that helped was that I had no means to save a program. I had to re-type it every time from the listings in the magazines, the main method of distributing software back then but for cartridges.

I later learned several different programming languages, and the first GUI I used was one I actually wrote myself (later, on a different computer which actually had a floppy disk drive).

And while my job is in programming, most of it is still typing. GUI use is limited to setting up the project in the IDE, which can be a lot of clicking and selecting, but once the basic hardware framework is set up, it's all editor work.

Slowly dismembering Azure Devops with my teeth

I’m an energy engineer, so coding isn’t the main part of job, but I use Python a lot for data analysis. So I load CSV files and reformat the data into how a particular program or person wants it. I also dabble with SQL and PowerShell for configuring data pipelines, basically picking a subset of data out of a database and using PowerShell to automate that extraction and the upload to a server.

I'm by no means a veteran programmer, but I do study computer science and write automation scripts at work.

We get questions like this one every now and then, and usually the answers coming from experienced developers are: "You're looking for an engaging project idea." Not sure if this fits your case, but it seems like it to me.

Basically, pick your interest and then look for something related to it that you could write code for. You like video games? Try making games, cheats for games, mods or some other companion apps. If you're struggling to find a suitable interest, you can always try writing scripts to automate your everyday computer tasks.

So my question is, since everyone on lemmy is a programmer, what do you guys actually do?

The answer to this question will vary a lot, depending on the specifics of the person's job or interests. Though there is often a lot of copying and pasting involved.