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dev.to staff -
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Dhanush N -
Top comments (28)
Senior Remote Contract Software Developer here. I'll describe yesterday because it's a fairly common day for me.
Remote Contract Developer
:)
I'm getting pretty jealous of the folks in the thread who work from home and wake up well before their clients.
Seems like a good way to have lots of nice productivity and then finish up with a few meetings later on.
Martin Fowler’s blog has a good take on this pne, I guess it was posted here on dev.to
effective remote is hard, most of the people working remote might be productive for few hours a day (because they manage only their individual schedule). Most of remote/distributed teams, though, are loosing to on-site. There is a high chance of working in a silo and “what the hell have you built” effect.
So don’t envy )
Cry
I am a developer (right now, the developer) for a genomics core lab.
What we do is gene sequencing (reading, not writing) for a research institution. There are many labs that need sequences done, and few of them do it enough for it be worthwhile for them to get their own sequencer, so there's us.
What I do, most days, is look at two screens at a standing desk and type.
My corner of the lab is mostly about meta-data. Who brought in samples? What are the samples? What do you want done with them? How are we getting paid? This is mostly web forms and SQL, and I go in to fix data much more often than I do to fix or update the tools, but that does happen.
Because nobody wants to waste time and money sequencing bad samples, there are Quality Assurance steps. My code generates config files, so we don't get "sample 1, sample 2" in output that we have to associate with the sample IDs later. I also have some visualization tools that allow us to inform our customers where we are in the process.
Sequencing can take between a few hours and a week, depending on the engine, and you end up with about 100 characters of ACGT per read, and all the reads are in different files, and the assembly process occurs to make it into one full genome, which can be several hundred GBs. Here we must remember that file systems are filled with inodes, and you can kill a file system with a huge number of small files, even if disk usage is still small. This is not part of my workflow, yet.
The output of the assembly is on a multi-petabyte storage system (shared across departments) connected to several research clusters, and we have several ways to share this data. If our customers are also on this cluster, we use Access Control Lists (ACLs) to ensure they can access it. Previously, it was done via
lnand magic, but the new storage system supports ACLs, which is better. I wrote tools that add and remove access control based on stored rules across large directories, but now that that's working, I rarely have to think about them.If a customer does not have access to these systems, or if we have moved their data onto tape storage, we use a service called Globus to give them access. Because the permission to share this data lies with us, not our customers, I wrote a proxy to for this. I spend much more time checking that systems are up and helping the customers and their collaborators navigate this service than working on the tools themselves.
Additionally, I'm a computer guy in a lab where much of the work is biochemical, so fixing PCs, running cable, and answering questions on Excel also fall to me.
Weekly:
Nearly everything else changes depending on what's going on that day or week.
I'm a Senior Dev for an online clothing retailer. Mostly web-focused (full stack, all JS), but with a sizeable chunk of time devoted to more Enterprise-y stuff (Java).
Typical day:
Web Developer:
I'm a senior government developer and my days are usually like this:
As a developer for an ad agency, I usually have a variety of tasks for a variety of different clients on any given day or during any given week; the dynamic nature of my job is one reason why I have really enjoyed working at an agency!
One hour I may be creating/editing/fixing emails (so much fixing) for one client's Q2 retargeting campaign, while the next I'll be provisioning a different client's production environment and preparing that Wordpress site to deploy to prod the next hour.
Other tasks you could find me doing include updating other static sites, working on year-old QA findings someone re-discovered, cutting up landing pages for retail acquisitions, and joining a task force of coworkers for a new project kick off.
Architect (as in buildings, not software;)
Design Director at HENN Beijing
Then, the most fun part of the day:
Web Developer here:
I work at a music school.
I:
I get funny looks at the local Ruby meetups.
Developing software, as a remote freelance dev ... web apps, mobile apps, enterprise systems. A fairly large part of it is also keeping my knowledge up to date (and expanding it). A third component (being a freelancer) SHOULD be marketing and networking but I'm not nearly spending enough time on that.
I am a Senior Email Developer at a financial company. Oddly, I do less and less coding as time goes on :( In general, my workday looks like this.
Check emails
Make edits to HTML file(s) and upload into ESP
QC HTML files w/edits made by other team members
Set up and launch emails via ESP
Attend meeting(s)
Rinse and repeat
I'm probably way oversimplifying it. On a good day, I also do the following
Update or create documentation
Attend training / upskilling
Find videos/tutorials for weekly lunch and learns
Implement LEAN practices
Freelance Web developer, programming teacher and software developer (tough rarely these days). Dependending on the day (wednesday is my "client meetings" day, monday and thursday are my "teacher" days):
In between, I make my day more pleasent with some lemon juice, some ambient, post rock or instrumental music and taking periods of time to stretch and make other stuff at home.
Its interesting actually how most answers are about domains - gene sequences, retail, etc. Here’s a challenge - would you guys be able to desribe what you do as a programmer, without breakfast/commuting/domain details?
To understand better, how CS is applied.
I’ll start - I mostly did maintetance of current prod apps - bugfixing and hammering in new features. Recently I do more greenfield projects (because team leverages small components approach, I avoid word u-services), so I spent some time analysing requirements and deciding on whether it makes sense to apply sophisticated patterns like actor model and CQRS, and eventually decide that old simple-crud-database-centric desing would do just fine ))))
from time to time I have a chance to do something interesting, a moment when a smart pattern makes a good match for business challenge is very rewarding )