Ask Lemmy

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.

Slowly dismembering Azure Devops with my teeth

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).

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#.

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.

It's a very diverse field with myriad platforms. A game dev's day will be very different than a dev working for a bank. Most of my work career has been boring soul-sucking "move dollar amount x from here to there" corporate bullshit that paid the bills. As a hobbyist, I've taken a crack at coding for games, music, custom postscript generation, ray tracing, etc.

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.

Look into “recreational programming.” Make shit for the joy of making shit. Creation in it of itself is something to be sought after imho. Did’t finish that website? Who cares?! Don’t have any useful ideas? Make something useless!! Don’t worry about “users” or making the next big thing in tech. If you’re having fun click-clacking on your keyboard and solving problems, that’s all that matters

So to answer your question, I’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything: web, db, graphics, interpreters, osdev, the works. The very few projects I’ve ever “finished,” however, are my lower-level ones; I just love getting right up close to the metal. Find a niche that interests you, start a million projects in it, and be proud of the one you finish years after you probably should’ve

Right now, I’m working on a custom programming language/game engine built with Vulkan and LLVM. It’s got first-class support for a bunch of cool game and graphics stuff, and I’m super passionate about it right now. I’ll probably lose steam and only come back to it months after, but I don’t mind

Edit: Also, don’t be afraid to use libraries to focus on what you want to focus on. I used to have an obsession with writing absolutely everything myself from the ground up, but I’ve since come to the realization that other people are MUCH smarter and more talented than I am, and I should trust them to write software for me. A great example of this is LLVM and my graphics language — depending on someone else to do the super complex compiler design lets me focus on what I wanna make: a language front-end and graphics library. It’s important to limit your scope to only what you care about

I program out of my own need, and if something/a project catches me, it really catches me (ADD). So for a large part, it's customizing software and scripting for my server (selfhosting and hosting others).

As for larger projects, rn I'm managing a middle-sized but fucked up old django webapp, and rewriting it.

Mostly, it's actually writing code (primarily python), including reading docs/tutorials and adapting that to how I actually need it, in my head, and integrating that into the codebase.

At work, it's the fixing of small stuff in Java Spring. And that certainly does not catch me at all.

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.

Not much.

There's coding and there's coding. Just as you can use English to write fiction, you can use it to write a manual. Programming languages are the same. Well, maybe a bit more concise and confined, but the point is, you can flick around bytes on a bus or thousands at a time in CUDA. You can draw a triangle for a game or create a template UI with the click of a button and fill in the blanks. It's all 'coding', but wildly different.

You might have heard about the meme that coders are wizards comanding magical stones, aka processors. Sometimes, we might as well be. Computer scientists come up with stuff so briliant that even the best of their own can hardly understand it. They write stuff that does stuff for stuff that does stuff for the stuff you wrote, and all of a sudden you did something without even really knowing what happened or how it works.

With that in mind, I can explain what I do in one sentence or countless hours. I write stuff to test stuff that absolutely has to work. The devil is in the detail.

My last project is using machine learning to sort data for a company and the flow kinda goes like this:

1. Use the advanced tab in the browser on the UI search pagr for the company to expose the API query for the data I want to have
2. Write some shell script to programmatically call the API for the data I want.
3. Realize that there's actually a limit to how much data the API can return BUT the metadata says how much there is beyond the limit.
4. Write some script to paginate (scrape over) all that data and save as a JSON file
5. Realize my JSON is badly formatted and some queries are empty, so do some error checking and massage to make it work right.
6. Create a python script to ingest the parts of the saved data I want and write it to a SQLite database. This takes ongoing refinement.
7. Do some sql to count how many entries I got in the time period I was getting data for, and compare to a tool the company has to aggregate said data. It was close enough.
8. Go learn about Jaccard similarity and locality sensitive hashing. Use this to write a script to deduplicate the database so I don't have a zillion repeated entries. Also python, but it starts with some cursor stuff and sql.
9. Do the actual project which is trying to get some reinforcement learning to label the data automagically. This means I also have to write some methods to get particular mixes of the data I've already collected. For example I want my mix to have 50 percent red balls, 20 percent green balls and 30 percent blue balls. How do you pick the right number of balls from the total set? It's not hard but it takes some thinking.
10. Wrap this thing up in a script that will do some load balancing on a machine with lots of gpus and CPUs so I don't hog the entire server rack. Submit it and let it cook.
11. Write it again so I can wrap options around it and optimize hyperparameters.
12. Start working up the results to show improvement overall. If it's better than what the company already has...
13. Time to fire up the old git repo and make sure the commits are clean. Add readme and make files (bc I prefer to deploy with make) and put it in the hands of another engineer who will roll it out for that company.

Idk it's not a super sophisticated problem but it has a lot of moving parts and you have to kind of tackle them in order. Mostly it's "hey here's an obstacle to the end goal, how do I fix it on my own in a smart way?"

Then do it.

I work at an Infrastructure Cloud company. I design and implement API and Database schemas, I plan out backend workflows and then implement the code to perform the incremental steps of each workflow. That's lots of code, and a little openapi and other documentation. I dig into bugs or other incidents. That's spent deep in Linux and Kubernetes environments. I hopefully build monitors or dashboards for better visibility into issues. That's spent clicking around observability tooling, and then exporting things I want to keep into our gitops repo. Occasionally, I'll update our internal WebUI for a new feature that needs to be exposed to internal users. That's react and CSS coding. Our external facing UI and API is handled by a dedicated team.

When it comes to learning, Id say find a problem you have and try to build something to improve that problem. Building a home lab is a great way to give yourself lots of problems. Ultimately, it's about being goal oriented in a way where your goal isn't just "finish this class".

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.

Mostly what I do is have anxiety about not knowing what to do since no project ideas come to mind and then feeling guilty about not doing anything.

Doing more game dev helps, but my mindset of not doing something because better projects already exist definitely keeps me from programming a lot.

I write software in many languages that does the things i want it to do. i understand how to write code that works. most of the time i write software it works on the first few tries. i don't do a lot of copy pasting. i write functions and use libraries to create things. it's strange to me, but from what i hear, it's becoming rare for people to really understand how to make software.

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

Hey now, some of us hate programming and the deepest we go is being scripters. I, for example, am dogshit at coding, but I am pretty solid at systems and network administration.

I only program for fun, usually in video games. A lot of games let you code in LUA (shout outs to computercraft)

Its fun for me to write it out, and i dont really understand how to use git, so I write it all out.

I'm not working as a developer right now, so most of the stuff I write are supplementary for my creative projects. If I have a problem involving too much manual work, I want to figure out a solution to minimise it. Mostly done in scripting languages like Python and Ruby. Also doing number crunching and plots in the R programming language.

For example, I'm working on tools to help my photography workflow. I sometimes get weird ideas like "I wish I could have a better idea where I have taken photos in", which turned into a script that takes coordinate metadata from photos and spits out a .kml file a mapping software can read.

I don't really copy/paste code much. Sometimes the tools you use in the scripting language land spit out automatically generated stuff which you then develop further.

I'm a data engineer, which means I write code that manages data aka databases. RN I'm mostly working with python, pyspark, managing data transformations from different providers. I'm also managing the deployment and execution of such pipelines via terraform.

I don't copy much code, if at all. I do search plenty examples online but then I write my own. I'm at the point where I could adapt myself into almost any language in a week though, they are very similar.

If you want to go into coding focus on understanding the functionality of the code, what it is actually doing and why is it done like it is, that should give you a lot of flexibility when changing frameworks or languages. A lot of stuff is super similar across the board.

About your question, "a full stack Dev with sufficient sql and python" is probably a front-end Dev that does JavaScript and CSS, with some front framework like react or Vue, which will have to create the code of the webpages, build components... They also mention sufficient SQL and python, which implies that the backend is done in python and that they have some database. Probably Django or flask. In the backend you create business logic, stuff like "get me the list of users", things the front-end asks the backend. For some queries the backend will also ask info to a database, and it will have a SQL client where it will have sql code to query stuff.

Hope this helps.

I make mods for games. I actually type code. Most of the time... Sometimes I just copy and paste because, I mean... There is not an infinite number of ways certain things you wanna do can be done and why reinvent the wheel.

I taught myself starting in high school, from actual books! Dry, boring, heavy, books.... And they sucked!

I don't know enough to make it a job tho. I certainly have no idea how even working with multiple people on a single thing works.

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.

I'm in the same boat as you. The GUI thing doesn't interest me. And I end up knowing "basic to intermediate" knowledge of a few different languages because, when you get right down to it, once your somewhat familiar with one object oriented language, the others fall in line pretty quickly.

I find that for learning, I have to have a project to be working on. I can't just sit and do exercises about classes, tuplets, and all that crap. I need to be able to say "okay...I want to make x do x on this project I'm working on...and then troll around the internet to figure out how to do it.

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.