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!

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
    10·
    4 days ago

    a full stack developer sufficient in sql and python

    Ok, let me first try to explain what happens on a good day, before going cynical.

    Let’s assume we have an existing system. You go to what for you appears to be a website, fill some text fields, click on a button, etc. In the background a lot of shit happens. Typically the backend part of the system consists of tens of services each doing it’s own thing. Some participate in returning a response to you, the user. Others just process data further for analytics, security, etc.

    One day someone (in most companies a product manager, or a UX researcher) comes up with an idea for a new feature. A user should be able to do XY. And of course pay for it.

    That’s where you step in. Since you mentioned full stack, you will need to do everything.

    • Create a new page with forms, buttons, nice colors and pictures on the frontend
    • Accept the result of user actions of the above to an API in one of the services mentioned
    • Save the data into a database (this is where SQL comes into play)
    • Retrieve data from a database (SQL again)
    • Emit various events or API calls to other services, informing about what just happened

    This is all done with code. You can copy/paste, vibe code, just type it yourself. Code is the least of your concern. Making sure it all works together is what’s tricky. You will go through several iterations until you get it right. Then you write automated tests for it (TDD people don’t come at me).

    Also you communicate to other people in the company about any dependencies and overlaps with what others are doing. Finally, you can deploy the code to production which will make it available globally to users.

    I just described about 50% of the programmer job. I didn’t mention code reviews, architecture discussions, plannings, retros, communities of practice, incident handling, herding cats…

    This is all valid in a good case scenario. good company and a good organization in it.
    In reality it’s mostly waiting. A lot of waiting. Despair if you can’t make it work. Happiness if you can. Then despair again because all you do is pointless. A lot of fighting against the system designed to make you as unproductive as possible. Or just giving up and faking it for a paycheck.