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Day in the life of a Back-end developer

Yannick van der Laak

3 min read

Our teammember Yannick happily provides some insight into a typical day in the life of a Back-end developer

As a developer at Levarne, you start your day with the morning standup meet, where you and your colleagues share with each other what you have been working on, and what you plan on doing throughout the day. Maybe you need some help with a technical problem, or someone asks you for help on a subject you have lots of experience with.

After the standup, you have a quick chat with the project manager of the project you are working on, to make sure you know what the requirements of your work are. After this chat, you know exactly what you need to build, so it’s time for focus mode!

You start by thinking about how to solve the problem. You think it over in your head, you draw the architecture, and maybe you start coding a basic solution. You look at your work, and think: “Hey, this problem might be solved more efficiently if I approach it in a different sort of way”. You start improving on your original solution, or maybe decide the second way was better. Maybe you struggle a bit to pick the correct solution. There are many ways to go about solving the problem, so which one is the best?

After a bit of time experimenting, you ask for a quick meet with some of your colleagues. You explain the problem, and have a short discussion about the way to solve it. As it turns out, the problem you are working on is something someone else also solved a while back! There are some differences, but you spot the similarities so you are able to find an efficient solution. After hearing the opinions of your colleagues, you pick the final solution.

Now it’s time to start building! This is the part which gives you energy, you know what to build & how to build it, and you are confident in your work! Maybe it was a frequently used UI component, maybe an entire page in a webapp that contains lots of data. It could be an API function that queries a database efficiently, or it could be the architecture of an entire database.

After a while the coding is finished. You have tested your work, and it seems like everything is working fine. You request a code review from one of your colleagues, and move on to the next task!

You notice the day is almost over, but there is still some time left to pick up some smaller tasks. Luckily, someone requested a code review from you for some of their work! You start looking through their code, and test around in the development environment to see if no strange new behavior was introduced. After a while you decide the code was fine, and the merged request was merged. The day ends with you & your colleague delivering the new code.

On to the next day!