Writing code: what a programmer’s workday looks like

1. A typical day in a developer’s life

Being a programmer is easy and pleasant ☀️. The Project Manager is responsible for organizing the work; the Product Owner maintains the product’s feature list. 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 ☕️, and sit down at your computer 🖥️. You open the team chat 💬, check whether there are any urgent messages and whether anyone is ill 🤒, and if everything is in order, you get to work.

You open the JIRA site, which holds all of your team’s tasks: the project backlog and the current sprint backlog. Tasks have already been prioritized by your Scrum Master/Team Lead or Product Owner.

You take the topmost task — the highest-priority one 🔝 — and start working on it. To do that, move it to the In Progress status. That takes a couple of clicks 🖱️. That’s it — the clock is ticking ⏳.

Additional information or a link to documentation is usually attached to the task description 📄. The task should include everything you need to complete it. Providing such information is your manager’s responsibility 👨‍💼.

If something is off, you can reassign the task (“task” in developer lingo) to your manager and leave a comment describing what questions came up and/or what information is missing.

2. Writing code

You’ve studied the task description and you understand what needs to be done. Great — get to work 🏁. Your experience from learning at CodeGym and working on a team will help 🤝.

Once the next feature is ready and you’re confident in 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 IntelliJ IDEA 🚀. You first commit your code to your local repository and then push (push) it to the central Git repository.

Most often, the latter is done via a Pull Request, where through Git you send a request to your team lead to review your code. If everything is fine and there are no comments, your team lead will approve (accept) ✅ your pull request and it will land in the main working branch of Git.

Important! Never sit in silence if you don’t know how to do a task. This situation comes up often, and many newcomers (and not only newcomers) handle it the wrong way. Remember: if after 2 hours you still haven’t figured out how to do the task, you need to notify your manager 🚩.

Also, don’t go to your team lead with the phrase “this can’t be done.” That phrase is very irritating, especially if the team lead knows for sure that “it can be done” and has done something similar more than once.

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 get it to work.” Your team lead will suggest what to Google 🔍.

That’s our tour of modern product development. Writing code is only a small part of the job, but everything is organized so that nothing distracts you from your work. So go ahead and start learning Java 25 — you’ll enjoy working as a programmer 😉.