A Day in the Life
Code School Book — Morgan Lopes and Tim Whitacre (18/30)
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Software engineering is like running — you practice how you play.
Nearly every team member I ran cross country with in high school still runs over a decade later. No one who played on the football team still plays football. Why? In football, the training and conditioning culminate under the Friday night lights. The practice, weight lifting, and drills consume their training but it’s vastly different from the performance.
Running is the opposite. Other than stretching and drills that bookend practice, most of our preparation for cross country races involved running. Running during the week to practice and running during the performance. The pace was more intense and there were more spectators, but one closely mirrored the other.
Software engineering is like running. It’s a sport where you practice how you compete. Whether you’re learning to code, tinkering with a side project, or working professionally, it involves the same underlying skills. The behaviors and disciplines transfer instinctively. If you enjoy critical thinking, problem-solving, and learning involved in coding bootcamp, there is a good chance you’ll enjoy doing it as a job. Conversely, if every moment is agonizing or dull, graduating into a career of similar work will likely just compound the distaste.
The daily life of a software engineer involves writing code, googling solutions, and reacting to error messages. It’s a constant pursuit to improve, grow, and refine. If we’re lucky, the challenges get bigger, the technology changes, and our skill increases. The underlying elements are largely the same.
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