Writing code

1. A typical day in a developer’s life

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

You come to work in the morning, make yourself some tea or coffee ☕️, sit down at the computer 🖥️. You open the team chat 💬, check whether there are any urgent messages, whether anyone got sick 🤒, and, if everything is fine, you get to work.

You open the JIRA site, which stores the list of all tasks for your team: the project backlog and the backlog of the current sprint. The tasks are already sorted by priority by your Scrum Master/TeamLead or ProductOwner.

You take the top task — the highest-priority one 🔝 — and start working on it. To do that, you need to move it to the In Progress status. This is done with a couple of clicks 🖱️. That’s it, the timer starts ⏳.

The task description usually includes additional information or a link to documentation 📄. The task must contain all the information you need in order to complete it. Having that information is your manager’s responsibility 👨‍💼.

If something is off, you can reassign the task (“task,” in developer slang) to your manager and write in the comments 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 studying on JavaRush and your experience working in a team will help 🤝.

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

Most often, the last operation is done via a Pull Request, when you use Git to send a request to your team lead to review your code. If the code is great and there are no comments on it, your team lead will approve (accept) ✅ your pull request and it will end up in the main working Git branch.

Important! Under no circumstances should you sit silently if you don’t know how to do a task. This situation happens often, and many newcomers (and not only newcomers) often 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 about it 🚩.

Also, you shouldn’t go to the 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 before—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.” The team lead will tell you which direction to google 🔍.

That’s the overview of modern product development. Writing code is only a small part of all the work, but everything is organized so that nothing distracts you from your work. So go ahead and move on to learning Kotlin 2.3 — you’ll enjoy working as a programmer 😉.