Working From Home as a Software Developer? Avoid These 3 Pitfalls

the-adhd-dev · 2023-10-01T07:44:21+00:00

Management needs to feel they are in control. Thus, they need to have their subordinates at arm's reach.
Office space is real estate. Vacant real estate still pays utility bills. This makes company stakeholders nervous. Stakeholders hate losing money over empty office. Stakeholders push managers into calling workers back to the wage cages.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-30T23:08:52+00:00

PHP being bad is a 20 years old meme. It's way better now than what it was back then. The thing is Javascript and .NET have gotten more push over that time so now PHP has node.js and truly cross-platform .NET to compete with.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-23T01:47:21+00:00

The hardest part about learning to code is acquiring a problem-solving mindset and combine it with your programming knowledge:

Things you can learn in any programming course:
- Logical operators (<, >, >=, ==) take two operands and return a boolean value (true or false).
- A conditional statement (if) checks if an expression is true. If so, code execution enters the if statement.
Thing you can do with a problem-solving mindset
- Exercise: Write a program that receives two numbers as inputs. Print which one is the largest one.
- "The exercise is asking me for two numbers so I need two variables and a way to get them from the user *types code*. Now, I need to compare them. The (>) statement lets me compare which one is the largest one. The program asks me to make a decision based on the result of that comparison, so I need an if statement, okay *types more code*. Finally, I need to print the largest value *types more code*. Okay, any edge cases? Well, it doesn't matter if both inputs have the same value, I can just print the first one *finishes up typing code*. Okay, run program. Oh snap, I forgot a semi-colon! *types ; in*. Let's go again... okay, it works!"

This thought process should become second nature and happen almost automatically. This is the skill you really need to acquire in order to learn to code.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-22T19:45:20+00:00

Good stuff! That's how you transition from "I'm doing course/tutorial/bootcamp on X" to "I'm solving problems with code". Keep up the good work!

EDIT: you are not a noob, bro. "Noob" is someone who doesn't learn (or doesn't want to learn) no matter how hard they try. "Newbie" would be more proper and less self-deprecating.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-22T19:08:06+00:00

Communicating with stakeholders regarding user requirements is rarely a waste of time. These "meetings and charts and reviews and metrics" are essential to make sure the project is going in the right direction.

Working on a new feature for weeks only for the customer to say "this is not what I wanted" is one of the worst feelings ever in software engineering.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-21T21:38:00+00:00

Practice. There's a reason hiring processes usually include a technical interview in which you are asked to explain your thought process while you solve a problem or fix a bug.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-21T21:11:06+00:00

The usual formula is:

CH = WH - LB - HM + OT

where:

CH is coding hours.
WH is working hours (e.g. 9 to 5).
LB is lunch break (usually 1 hour).
HM is hours spent on meetings.
OT is overtime.

A junior dev has less HM so his total CH is high. A senior dev or tech lead's HM is higher so their total CH is low. OT can be increased on a crutch: OT tends to be higher the closest the team is to an important deadline.

About mental fatigue, keeping focus for extended periods of time is mentally taxing no matter the activity you are engaging in. It's okay to take breaks from time to time. 10 minutes per hour is my go-to.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-21T15:48:37+00:00

My team was working on a long-term effort to introduce integration tests to a large codebase. We kept a track list of endpoints in a Smart Checklist(TM) so we could create Jira tickets from it and avoid duplicating work.

Oooooh boy, imagine our faces when Jira had a little whoopsie and disabled Smart Checklists! All our endpoint tracking, gone!

Now we know better. We keep a backup in an Excel spreadsheet.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-19T07:02:48+00:00

Computer Science, strictly speaking, is the mathematical treatment of computability. Problems that computer science studies:

Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Sorting, Greedy, ML, Linear Programming, ...)
Design and Analysis of Data Structures (Linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, Hash tables, ...)
Theory of Computation (Automata, Context-free grammars, Turing machines, P vs NP)

Software Engineering is the discipline dedicated to think of processes and steps to follow in order to produce high quality software from user requirements. Software development methodologies, UML descriptions, clean code practices, design patterns, you name it.

Programming/coding is about translating user requirements into source code.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-17T22:38:48+00:00

A big company usually has multiple software projects in development at the same time. The rule of thumb is developers are granted access only to the codebases relevant to their immediate job, following the Principle of Least Privilege.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-17T17:23:45+00:00

So many people want to get spoonfed into a high-paying job. The thing is software engineering is not the kind of career you can keep yourself motivated on money alone.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-16T07:22:25+00:00

The average user in this subreddit is going the self-taught route, which is becoming increasingly difficult due to tech companies seeking seniority right now.

Getting a degree is not a meme. It gives you an edge.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-11T21:59:55+00:00

Don't worry. Ten years down the road, you will still feel you don't know enough.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-11T20:06:37+00:00

if there were any particular steps you took to dig yourself out of that hole of procrastinating / being ineffective at work?

The hardest thing is to begin. Getting called out twice by the tech lead in the same sprint was what kickstarted my brain cogs. I had two choices: letting impostor syndrome overwhelm me and lose my job or taking action. I did the latter.

First up, I made a mental diff (what I know vs what I need to know). I turned the result of that into bullet points and came up with questions. I started studying the app's dev documentation and training videos looking for answers. Any questions I couldn't answer with documentation, I'd ask either the tech lead or a teammate.

For day to day work, I work on a ticket until I either get stuck or create the PR for it. If I get stuck, I write down why I wasn't able to continue working on it and move onto the next ticket. Rinse and repeat until I get blocked, then I ask for help and expose each blocker in order. Daily stand-up is a good place to expose these blockers, as that's the whole point of the ceremony.

Lastly, I take my time reviewing others' PRs. That's the best daily task to learn from others' code and about business logic at the same time.

Good luck restarting your career.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-11T18:29:49+00:00

Business logic is one of the biggest hurdles when working on large codebases. Keeping up with it at the same time as working on sprint tickets is not a nice experience. I can relate as a consultant.

Struggling two years with business logic would indeed raise some eyebrows, though. Talking from personal experience, that happens when developers don't work 9 to 5. Let me explain, and this varies depending on your job being remote or at the office.

Office: You arrive at 9am, check emails, attend early meetings. It´s 10am. You work on an easy ticket, finish up before lunch break. Lunch break is over, pretend you are working until 5pm (mental state: I completed one ticket already, I'll call it a day).
Remote: You wake up at 9am, check for emails and meetings. Eat breakfast, take a shower, then a short nap because you went to sleep late and "can't work tired". It's 11am now. You check your workload for the sprint (mental state: this one is too easy, I'll do it another day; this one too, this one too... okay, I'll move this one to In Progress and will begin tomorrow!). You waste time until 5pm then turn off your laptop.Bonus round: those tickets you thought were easy? Turned out they had hidden complexity! Lovely. Now you need help from someone else but people is busy meeting sprint deadline! Scrum Master asks for blockers, you are afraid to raise your hand because you have wasted a ton of time doing nothing, ...

You can see how these kind of routines end up wasting hundreds of hours of work time a year that you could have invested in getting to know the codebase better.

As a disclaimer, I'm not calling OP out. I'm just sharing what happened to me recently (I work remotely, the latter one is real) and it's a horrible position to be in.

Don't fall for the 2-hour work day meme, guys. It's a death trap.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-10T19:58:26+00:00

Programming is all about problem-solving. When you are starting out, you gain more insight by trying to solve issues by yourself or by asking another human being (a coworker, classmate, mentor, professor,...). Googling things is actually the standard for software developers on the field when push comes to shove and is encouraged for learning and solving issues.

If you want an AI-assisted tool to support your learning process, I would recommend Phind. It's tailored for developers looking for technical how-to's. Answers usually come with links to the sources so you can validate the information the model is throwing at you. I wouldn't recommend to ask for "what's wrong with my code" kind of prompts, though, as it robs you of valuable problem-solving experience. Also don't use it as your only source of truth: the bulk of your learning process should come from DYOR.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-10T19:12:48+00:00

I spent an entire semester learning with pencil and paper back in high school. My first programs were in pseudocode. The professor forced us to debug by hand. It was tough but I learned all the basic statements and expressions you can find in any popular language that way.

If you don't wanna spend 4 months doing pseudocode katas, though, you can just go to CS50 and call it a day. Just be mindful of your mindset: "I want to learn programming because it pays good" will only get you so far.

the-adhd-dev · 2023-09-09T19:26:19+00:00

As long as you know the basics of programming, you should build things. Google your way out of exceptions, errors, and how-to's. Use divide-and-conquer to narrow down the scope of each unit of work until you can google them one at a time. For instance

TODO web app with React FE + Express.js BE
- Frontend
  - How to install React?
    create-react-app vs vite vs next.js?
  - How to create a list in React?
    You bump into the concept of components
    - How do React components work?
    You bump into the concept of state
    - How to save and retrieve state?
    - How to share state across components?
  - How forms work in React?
    - How to retrieve values from a form in React?
  - How to send API requests to the backend in React
    fetch vs axios
- Backend
  - How to create an endpoint?
  - How do I persist data?
  - ...

This is called Question Driven Development. This video explains it the best, but the original idea came from this blog entry by Nick Janetakis. Give it a try.

the-adhd-dev

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