Things to do on a boring day in software development
If you’re not coding, what else could you be doing?
Note: This post wasn’t published till 3rd February, 2024 because I lost interest in it. It eventually got published (at the older date) because I didn’t want to just discard them. But it hasn’t been updated or completed.
There are hours/days in the life of a software engineer where they’re done with their tasks or waiting for something and there’s nothing for them to code. Here are some things you can do on such boring days.
Read
Read about technologies that you use or plan to use. Go through their websites. Read hacker news articles about that. (You can search hackernews with algolia). Go through the subreddit (if any). Reading is the single most important way programmers level up their skills.
Write
If you have a blog, write a post. If you do not have a blog, start a blog, and write a post. When I write about something, the vague thoughts I have about that topic becomes more concrete. It helps me understand it in newer ways. Similarly, once I write something down and give a URL to it, it becomes a valuable piece of content on the internet that I can later share to others for reference.
Help others
There are plenty of people around you in your team who can use some of your help, be it in refactoring their code, fixing their bugs, learning something new, or just in having a fresh look at their codebase.
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