Writing code: what a developer's workday looks like

1. A typical day in the life of a developer

Being a programmer is easy and enjoyable ☀️. The organization of work is handled by the Project Manager, the list of product features — by the Product Owner. Meetings are organized by the Scrum Master. All organizational processes are as formalized and standardized as possible ✅.

You arrive at work in the morning, make yourself some tea or coffee ☕️, sit down at your computer 🖥️. You open the team chat 💬, check for urgent messages, see if anyone is sick 🤒, and if everything's fine, you start working.

You open JIRA, where all your team's tasks are stored: the project backlog and the current sprint backlog. The tasks are already sorted by priority by your Scrum Master/TeamLead or ProductOwner.

You pick the top task — the most priority 🔝 — and start working on it. To do that, you need to change its status to In Progress. This is done with a couple of clicks 🖱️. And now, the timer starts ⏳.

Usually, additional info or a link to documentation 📄 is added to the task description. The task should contain all the necessary info for you to complete it. Having this info is the responsibility of your manager 👨‍💼.

If something's wrong, you can reassign the task ("tasca" in programmer slang) back to your manager and leave comments about what questions or missing info you have.

2. Writing code

You studied the task description and understand what needs to be done. Great, now get to work 🏁. Your experience from CodeGym and teamwork 🤝 will help you here.

Once a feature is ready and you've verified it, you need to push the code to Git. This can be done with a couple of clicks directly from your IDE. In your case — from Rider 🚀. You commit your code first to your local repository, then push it to the central Git repository.

Most often, this last step is done via a Pull Request, where you send a request to your team lead for code review. If everything's good and there are no comments, your team lead will approve (accept) ✅ your pull request, and it will be merged into the main branch.

Important! Never sit silently if you don't know how to do a task. This situation happens often, and many beginners (and not only beginners) tend to handle it incorrectly. Remember, if you haven't figured out how to do the task within 2 hours, you need to notify your manager about it 🚩.

Also, avoid telling your team lead "this can't be done." Such phrases are very annoying, especially if your team lead knows for sure that "it can be done" and has done similar things multiple times.

If you're unsure how to proceed, say: "I spent two hours/two days trying to figure out how to do this, but I can't manage." Your team lead will guide you on what to Google 🔍.

And that's how we get an overview of modern product development. Writing code is just a small part of the whole process, but everything is organized so that nothing distracts you from your work. So go ahead and start learning C# — you'll enjoy working as a programmer 😉.