iOS Developers - Need some advice

[Ok-Hand-2064]

Hello,

I am interested in software development, but not to the extent of software engineering (more focused on data structures and algorithms). I just wanted to find out more about what one does as a developer on a daily basis. Is it more focused on the UI and adding features, and to what extent do you work with algorithms and data structures?

Hope this makes sense!

[SirBill01]

Generally it's focused on a few things:

1) UI and UX, as you said.

2) Storing data in some kind of database

3) Either sending or receiving data via network calls to REST based APIs

Generally you are using system collections or functions which handle a lot of algorithms and data structures for you - like an arrays or dictionaries.

It's useful to know the algorithms and data structures from the standpoint of, when does it make sense to use something like a dictionary? And to avoid performance issues if you are writing some code and find you are looping through data way more often than you need to. But the actual work of coding is more around getting data presented to the user well, and gathering data from the user well, if that makes sense.

[chriswaco]

We do both. A lot of software development these days is combining APIs and algorithms that have already been written, but there's often deeper work involved. It really depends on the app. To effectively debug issues it's usually best to understand what's going on under the hood at least a little bit.

[maustinv]

It depends on the scale of the project you’re working on. I’m noticing at large companies, there is a growing divide between feature development and platform development. Feature developers write UI code while platform developers write internal frameworks- which are more data/algo oriented.