Developer Job Description

What do you tell people when they as what you do for a living? Do you say that you are a programmer or developer? What if they follow that up by asking what that means, or what your daily activity means?

I have an answer that I think describes what I do best.

Problem Solver

I am first a problem solver. I generally use technology as the tool to solve problems, but there are also times when a non-technical answer is really the best solution. Being able to break down the problem at hand and see it from different angles always me to provide numerous different solutions, then talking or thinking through those options should lead to the best possible solution. This works very well in a team environment because everyone has different ideas. Someone else will think up other ideas than I will, by sharing our ideas together we can build new ideas together.

Code Author

When a technical solution is chosen and I start writing code, I shift into a different role, Code Author. Here I am focused on writing the clearest, easiest to read, code that I can. Most of the time the code that I am writing is not unique. There are patterns to use or examples to follow. The most important thing I can do is make sure that the next developer can understand what my code is doing. Much like a author, I want to focus on my reader and not on myself.

Comments

Converting a Large AngularJS Application to TypeScript Part 1

I work on a project that uses AngularJS heavily. Recently we wondered if using a preprocesser like CoffeeScript or TypeScript for our JavaScript would be beneficial. If our team is going to switch languages, we would need to be able to convert existing code over without much pain and we would have to find enough value in switching that it would be worth the conversion. I had read an article that stated that because TypeScript is a SuperSet of JavaScript, you could convert a plain JavaScript file to TypeScript by changing the extension to .ts and not much else would need to change. I wanted to test out this claim, so I took a file that I was familiar with, an Angular Controller, and tried to convert it to TypeScript to see how much effort it would take and then try to figure out where we would benefit from using TypeScript. This is what the controller JavaScript file looked like to start out with: ( function () { 'use strict' ; angular .module( 'app'...

Interns: Taking off the training wheels

My intern team has been working for several weeks now on our new website. We have already completed one deployment to production and are finalizing our second one. We started with a plan to release often adding small bits of functionality as we go and so far that plan has been working really well. We already feel like we have accomplished a lot because we have completed many of our project's requirements and should easily be able to complete the rest giving us time to do even more than just the original requirements. One of the things I have had some difficulty balancing has been how much to lead the interns and how much to let them figure out on their own. In deciding what our team process should be and how we should allocate our time, I think it was important for me to do more leading. I saw some deficiencies in how we were currently working and brought up some ideas for how we could address them. We had moved into spending all our time just working through stories and did not ...

My idea for Hearthstone to add more deck slots

Recently someone asked the Blizzard developers for more slots for decks in the game Hearthstone. The response was that they are talking about it and looking into it, but no decision has been made yet. One of the concerns over adding deck slots is that it could complicate the UI for Hearthstone and make it more difficult for new players to understand. I have what I think would be a good solution to add more deck slots without increasing the learning curve for the game much if at all. First I would take a look at the current selection screen for starting to play a game. It defaults to showing the decks that are custom built by the player if they have any custom decks, and there is an option to page over to the basic decks. This basic deck screen is perfect for how I would change this process. Instead of having 2 pages of decks, 1 for basic and 1 for custom, you would just see the select a Hero screen. Then once you selected the Hero you wanted, you would see all of the decks that ...

Christian Peters

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