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 write code in a niche industry, in an even more niche language.

With 20 years experience I am finally at the point that much of my stuff works without too much headache.

Unfortunately, now that I’m finally good at it, it’s become a much smaller part of my overall job.

Nothing I look forward to more than being left alone for a few hours with my headphones on banging out a project.

I‘m working as a freelance web developer with creative agencies to create websites or applications and maintain existing projects. Mostly in PHP with a frontend written in HTML / CSS and some JS.

I also had trouble getting into coding initially since I’m a pretty visual thinker but a university course called „coding for designers“ that taught programming in Processing finally got me into it. In it you didn’t start with a boring ass calculator but make pictures and later games with a simple IDE.

A “full-stack developer” is someone who can do front-end / UI work (HTML, CSS and Javascript or whatever the frameworks and tools de jour are nowadays if we’re talking webdev), back-end work (APIs and “business logic” and all the stuff users don’t see), and often storage and infrastructure work (manage databases, write and optimize SQL queries, put things in buckets, get your code running on AWS / k8s / a pack of gophers / whatever)

that is

someone who wears too many hats and isn’t paid nearly enough by a company that doesn’t want to hire 4 engineers

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.

I’m not a dev, but I work with a lot of them, and I do a fair amount of bug testing and reporting for them. Devs do so much: they usually deploy and maintain the infrastructure (servers, virtual machines, databases etc.) upon which they build stuff, they write code in a bunch of different languages, connect things up to external APIs to add more functionality, process and combine datasets to use in the things they build, and plan/track all of that wok as granularly as possible using a variety of project management tools like GitHub or Jira.

Actually writing code from scratch is probably only 15 or 20% of what they do, at least at my relatively small company. And that’s usually spread out among a few different devs who have their own specialities.

It really depends, most people end up specializing into specific things they work on as software has generally become too big for single developers. We have people that only do frontend stuff so things look nice on the website, some only deal with the database and making sure we return results as efficiently as possible.

I started off doing the typical full stack but I’ve since branched off into DevOps so now I’m responsible for a few hundred servers across the globe that I keep updated and running smoothly.

Sometimes I work on new tools, sometimes I spend days tracking down weird problems, sometimes I’m rushing hotfixes because something is repeatedly crashing in production.

It’s worth noting that because you can click through UIs these days doesn’t mean that scales as you go. You can go spin up your app in a container in the cloud mostly through UI, but soon enough the defaults aren’t enough. I manage several hundreds of instances across a few clouds, I’ll well, well past clicking next next next finish. It’s just an easy and visual way to ease you into things, especially for beginners, as all the options available to you are there to see along with little help tooltips explaining what a setting does.

It also depends on what you do: if you work at a startup, clicking through Cloudflare’s dashboard is more than enough. When you have thousands of customers, you’re not managing the tens of thousands of settings you have to configure, you automate.

Code can describe things (HTML, CSS, HCL), code can configure things (YAML, JSON, Ansible), code can program things (PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc), code can query things (SQL), programming as a whole is very wide.

people have real life problems that they think can be solved with code

I write code that solves those problems, and create even more problems

Not a developer, but a PM and Dept Manager for many dev teams. Your question is wildly broad, but I’ll take a high level stab at it.

First, note that there is a lot of variety in software development. This includes industry knowledge, tech stacks, governance, roles and seniority. I.e. a jr programmer on a long established product may just bugfix, or unfuck client data, or make minor adjustment to features on a well understood codebase.

Alternatively a consultancy may be approached by a client to build something new from scratch using a yet to be determined stack. I’ll talk about this one. On a project like this the Most Sr dev usually has a title of “Architect”. They review the requirements and select the technologies that are appropriate for the job. You are often assembling multiple products to work together.

For example, if you get comissioned to build a company’s bespoke e-commerce website you have to get Inventory systems and to talk coherently with product descriptions and image systems, pricing modules, and payment processors and gateways, your in-house loyalty system for points or coupons, along with various shipping APIs from three different shippers and the postal services API for postal code geolocation and address validation. There are also a ton marketing metrics and data analytics that retailer’s want so every step of the way through the website what a customer clicks on and if they abandon the process withput making a purchase they can understand why. You could build all these systems from scratch, but why? There are a ton of pre made solutions that due to specialization, are better faster and cheaper than anything you can make. These are called system integrator jobs. Developers make all the systems talk to each other and build in any necessary business logic required.

Then a team will spend a few days configuring their environments. IDE, Repos, installing the tools amd modules required and configuring everything to work as part of a team. This includes the rules for promoting code, peer review, branch management strategies,

“Full Stack” just means you are adept at the back end - databases like Oracle and Mongo and SQL etc, the middleware business logic and anciliary modules as well as the front end making a usefull UI out of HTML and CSS.

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 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.

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 (aka spreading good practices to other teams), 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.

I am working as a scientist with very specific geo data. Most of the day I am doing data science deriving information from a huge data set, mostly rule based but I also apply machine learning and deep learning. I am lucky I can code Python, however our IT infrastructure is pretty shitty. I also do data quality assurance.

I need to attend many meetings, and communicate with partners. Every 1-2 months I attend conferences and also have presentations there.

Sorry for not being more specific, but I don’t want to dox myself.

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’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.

I’m a DevOps guy and seem to spend most of my time fixing AI slop.

First of all, there is no graphical stuff. That’s just for simple learning sandboxes.

We have an IDE - Integrated Development Environment. You can think of it as a glorified text editor. We type code in text and it gives us the equivalent of spellcheck, grammar check, autocomplete. They usually colorize the code so you can see structure, match ostensibly and quotes, and other low level assistance. But it gets much more useful with integrations to version control, scanners, build tools, download dependencies . You can click to build, test, scan, commit. They’re usually tons of other tools to make life easier.

But code is cheap and easy to write the first time: much more expensive to fix. Maintenance over time is far more expensive than writing it.

So now we have AI as another tool integrated into IDEs, and it is somewhat useful for generating new code based on patterns from previous code. But it’s never good enough to be an end result. A good developer can use the ai to get a jumpstart on new code, iterate it to get better, and almost always have to use their own knowledge to finish it to a working, maintainable result.

So I have a bunch of junior developers in another country, just directly checking in ai slop. They don’t seem to be experienced enough or diligent enough to recognize when it needs more work. Which means I need to spend a lot more time on code reviews trying to figure out the unorganized mess, give the same feedback over and over, review the same code many times, and inevitably spend much more time on bug fixes for their mess than I would have taken implementing it myself.

The thing is ai is not good at bug fixing. You can try to have it summarize the code, or compare it to best practices but it can’t really help figure out what’s going wrong and how to best fix it. Especially if the original code is ai slop to begin with.

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 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.