Writing Code

1. A typical day in the life of a developer

Being a programmer is easy and pleasant ☀️. The Project Manager is responsible for organizing the work, the Product Owner is responsible for the product feature list. Meetings are organized by the Scrum Master. All organizational processes are maximally formalized and standardized ✅.

You come to work in the morning, make yourself some tea or coffee ☕️, sit down at your computer 🖥️. Open the general chat 💬, check for any urgent messages, whether someone is sick 🤒, and if everything is fine, you start working.

You open the JIRA website, which contains the list of all tasks for your team: the project backlog and the current sprint backlog. The tasks are already sorted by priority by your Scrum Master/Team Lead or Product Owner.

You take the task from the very top — the highest priority one 🔝 and start working on it. To do this, you need to move it to the In Progress status. This is done with a couple of clicks 🖱️. Time starts now ⏳.

Additional information or a link to the documentation is usually added to the task description 📄. The task should contain all the necessary information for you to complete it. Providing such information is your manager's responsibility 👨‍💼.

If something is wrong, you can reassign the task ("task" in developer lingo) to your manager and write in the task comments what questions arose and/or what information is missing.

2. Writing code

You have studied the task description and understand what needs to be done. Great, start working 🏁. Your experience learning on CodeGym and your team experience will help you 🤝.

After the next feature is ready and you have verified it, you need to push the code to Git. This can be done with a couple of clicks right from the IDE. In your case — from CLion🚀. You commit your code first to your local repository, and then push (push) it to the central Git repository.

Most often the final operation is done via a Pull Request, when you send a request to your team lead for a code review through Git. If the code is fine and there are no comments, your team lead will approve (accept) ✅ your pull request and it will be merged into the main working branch of Git.

Important! Under no circumstances should you stay silent if you don't know how to do a task. This situation happens often, and many juniors (and not only juniors) often handle it incorrectly. Remember, if you haven't figured out how to do the task within two hours, you need to notify your manager 🚩.

Also, don't go to the team lead with the phrase “it can't be done”. Such a phrase is very annoying, especially if the team lead clearly knows that “it can be done”, and has done something similar himself multiple times.

If you don't know how to do it — say: “I spent two hours/two days trying to figure out how to do this, but I can't make it work”. The team lead will point you in the right direction for searching 🔍.

So we've walked through the picture of modern product development. Writing code is only a small part of the whole job, but everything is organized so that nothing distracts you from your work. So feel free to move on to studying C++ 23 — you will enjoy working as a programmer 😉.