· 2 min read
Things that developers do other than development
Developers do a lot of stuff that are often missed. This post highlights all of them
I got this question on LinkedIn and I wanted to write my thoughts down on Blog so that it can reach a bigger audience.
Meet Rajpal on LinkedIn
Hey ankush, myself meet rajpal, i am 2nd year undergrad student in btech - cse, i have done work mostly on backend development and rest api development, i still want to learn other things that a sde does in a industry other than development only. Please guide me.
My response
Developers do a lot of stuff. You could say coding is around 50% of it.
These may include,
- developing new code
- writing tests for your own code
- refactoring code to make it cleaner and maintainable
Other 50%.
- Reading other people’s code and coming up with a plan.
- Collaborating with other developers or QA.
- Requirement understanding and refinement.
- Coming up with plans or suggestions for the Business
- Reviewing other people’s or getting your code reviewed.
- Ensuring the CI build passes.
- Deploying code on different environments.
- Monitoring alerts
- Debugging
- Meetings
How much time you’d spend on code vs other activities would depend on how much experience you have within the team and what phase the project is in.
Examples:
- By phase:
- If the project is in early phased, you’d spend more time in requirement understand and refinement.
- If you are in a later part of the project, you’d spend more time debugging, deploying, monitoring alerts and collaborating with other devs or QA.
- By experience
- If you are a fresh new developer you’d be likely paired up with a senior developer who would focus more on requirement understanding.
I realized i didn’t answer what you really wanted.
In terms of learning, I would say it’d be helpful to go broad. try your hands on frontend (react), backend, database (SQL). If you can secure internship that would be be nice. Else just try your hands on things.
If you that’s done, you could try deploying the same apps using docker. Also, learn to use git, that will be helpful.
You could try your hands at LLMs. I haven’t dipped my hands in AI for a few years but it’s gaining traction. And companies pay better for AI.