Hmm, I am programming as a hobby, but I tried getting into it several times without ‘getting’ it too. I then somehow found the free cs50x online course and got hooked and finished all exercises. What helped me were clear goals to work toward and the immediate evaluation of the exercises. I could not get any of this from books or websites alone. I especially loved the sql problem sets.

I then worked on my last submission for a long time, which was a work related application. It worked fine on android and linux and I was proud to submit it, but there was no way to compile the program to get it to work on ios (yeah we’ve got iphones at work…) without a mac.

So then I rebuild the entire app in JavaScript and made it into a multiplatform progressive web app (My main goals were to make it completely work offline and then sync to my server and to let it run on (almost) every device.). I learned a lot in this time, it still got bugs, and designing the ui is somewhat painful (though I love working with inkscape to make icons and pictures and stuff, css though…) but this year I was able to get a test run at work and it was really helpful so far.

Bye, bye maintaining our large, confusing, error riddled, ancient excel tables by hand staring at them for hours!

I still got lots of features I want to implement and bugs to fix. I am aware that my app won’t be up to industry standards (no access to some expensive equipment and rule books), but it is still helpful and it is a lot of fun to work on.

And what happend since I am familiar with python and js and such is, that I try to automate everything, even if it sometimes takes more time to write the scripts. With more and more practice I find more and more problems to solve, like I want to build a weight training tracking app, and I know there are many available, but why not?

You need to find some clear goals and get hooked, and yeah that is something that I struggle with too. (I want to get into playing piano, but I currently struggle to make it click too). Too many hobbies and too few time…

Product owners say, "We want to change the site so users see a list of all the other users on their team with access to this project "

Okay. Do some thinking. Going to need the backend to return that information to the front end. Decide what URL that should be under (api/v1/projects/users, maybe?).

Now we make the backend actually do that. Create a new file for this endpoint. Update the routes file so that url points to this file. Write the handler class.

Does this endpoint take any particular input? We know who the caller is for free from the framework. We only want to return info about one project or all projects? Make that decision. Update URL if needed.

Write the code to get the other users on the projects in question. Maybe that’s SQL, but might also be OEM (code from a framework that generates SQL based on objects). Decide what information we actually need. Package that up and send it back. The specifics depend on language and framework.

Write automated tests for this. Make sure it works for

• 401 not logged in
• 403 asking about a project I don’t have permission for
• 404 asking about a user with no projects, or a project that doesn’t exist
• someone with 1 project
• someone with 2 projects
• someone with 10000 projects
• also consider what happens for 0, 1, 2, 10000 users on the project.

Realize this needs to paginate. Go back and change the handler code to do that.

Realize due to some quirk of how permissions work, someone can be on the project twice. Talk with the team about if we should just decide that here, or try to fix the root problem. Probably the former.

Add deduplication code, then, and test cases.

Open this up for code review.

Start the front end work.

Make a dummy page first and update your API calling code to know about this new route, assuming you don’t have that auto magically set up somehow. Make sure it calls it and gets a response.

Realize that staff users technically have access to every project in the system. Ask product if that’s how they want that to behave. If no, figure out what you all want that to do instead.

Do a bunch of react work to make the page pretty, put the response in the right UI elements with links to the right place. Realize the response you’re sending back makes building the links annoying because you didn’t send some part of it, so you’d need to make another request to the backend for every link. That sucks. Update the backend to include the user’s team-id that is for some stupid reason still in the URL. Comment on code review.

And now I’m tired of writing.

Edit: I hit submit before I was done. Finished now.

You need an actual problem to solve that your hyper focus likes, then you’ll go hard I bet. ~ professional developer with ADHD of 17 years.

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.

It helps to have a concrete problem to solve. If you just say I want to learn coding you’ll not go very far

Full stack python and SQL means python to handle user interface, data connectivity, interfacing with APIs, understanding/designing a database to perform the necessary data storage / retrieval in an optimal way for how your application works, creating all the logic, safe guards, etc.

Basically I have this thing I want to do, and it’s going to interact with a lot of data. Your tools are python and SQL and a small stack of money - make the thing that does it all

Full stack means all the parts, soup to nuts

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.

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

Junior - code Mid - code and meetings Senior - meetings

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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.

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.

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 work with a 7-person (6 devs and a lead) on a 20-year-old financial reporting application. We either pull or receive data from about 7 different systems where folks record contracts, funding documents, purchase requests, purchase orders, invoices, bills, etc. and pull them all together to build reports and UIs where users can search across all the data, and have it unified in one place. That’s about 90% of our workload, anyway. More recently, we’ve adopted workload from a couple big legacy systems that got sunsetted, where we’re actually the data-entry point, feeding data out to the main billing system.

Day to day, I work on everything from PL/SQL (Oracle’s SQL variant for compiled stored procedures) where the majority of our business logic lives, to VB.NET where two different HTTP Web servers live, as well as a large automated testing suite for that database business layer, to TypeScript where most of our UI logic lives. Occasionally, I might dip into plain JavaScript/jQuery or ASPX to work on older features.

There’s plenty of time spent writing code, but there’s also a LOT of time spent just discussing things among team. Probably about half of the time, overall. Part of why the project has lasted 20 years is that we’ve gotten very good at being able to interpret what non-technical finance and acquisitions folks want. Like, they might come to us and say “hey, can you add inter-departmental purchase requests to report X”, but they can’t always tell us what an “inter-departmental purchase request” is, or where that data lives in the external systems (and that’s not like a criticism, that’s just the reality of the fact that these people are accountants, not engineers). So, we’ll have to probe for specific requirements and/or reverse-engineer it out of an external database.

I also do open-source work in some of my hobby time, which is pretty much all C#.

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.