Name: My daily routine as a programmer (for software engineers)
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T19:09:23.000Z
Duration: 11 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey Tak late here and welcome back to another episode of the tack.

Past simple

Now, today, what we're going to be talking about is my daily routine as an ex Google tack lied as a software engineer.

Not a lot of people wonder with Is it that programmers do all they do?

We just stare at the computer eight hours a day?

And the other interesting things, I can tell you that if I just take a look at your schedule, I can tell you whether you're going to be a successful programmer or not.

You know, for example, one question like the Aska interviews is.

And if it's more than five, I might just walk you out right there.

But for me, I was structure my day and my activities around how I coat.

And a lot of this has become general daily happy for me that I don't even know this anymore.

But if I were to look at somebody else's schedule, I can quickly just be able to take a look and say, You know what I don't think that person is going to be successful clothing.

They need to change so much about the way that they structured their lives, their daily plant.

So in this video, we're going to recovering the daily routine of a professional programmer.

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All right, So the first thing you need to understand is that a good programmer is going to be structuring their day into blocks of time, large blocks of time.

The reason that you need these large chunks of time is such that you can get into the flow of coding.

Let me put it this way in the first hour that you're actually co think you're pretty much just reading up on documentation of some new a P I.

You're learning some new language, some skill, and you're spending a lot of your time looking into some other system and trying to figure out what that is.

The second hour you might actually be trying to implement that and building up a rough prototype.

And then that third hour, you might actually have time to start polishing that up and putting together something in hooking things in.

So you can see what I mean by if you only have one hour chunks of time here and there, and that's the longest you have.

Then every time you start coding, you're going to just get through that documentation portion and then you stop right there.

You've learned some stuff, but you haven't had time to actually apply that yet.

It's a lot like building 1000 piece puzzle where every time you start, you start from the beginning.

You need a large chunk of time, say, three hours or so, to be able to get through that whole chunk and then to save your work.

At that point, I see a lot of other people.

They don't have a proper work environment.

They maybe coding in bed clothing on the couch while watching TV getting interrupted all the time.

I remember when I was over at Google, even though that was open office workspace, people would still not interrupt each other.

They would be very hesitant to They may even pin you first over chat and then see if they can get you to respond at that point.

But nobody really wants to interrupt your workflow.

And if I have errands to run like I need to go to the grocery store or do laundry or something like that, I will try to batch those up such that I'm not doing them every 20 minutes.

If I know that, say, at 10 AM, I need to go to the supermarket.

That pretty much kills my home morning schedule.

It's just not something you can recover from.

You can't just say what you're gonna read documentation for 20 minutes.

You're the prototype in the next 20 minutes, right, several hours later, and then multiple hours later, you're going to try and put everything together again.

You know, you would just lose all of your train of thought over that period of time.

Now, the second interesting thing about the way a structure my day is I like to actually keep my lunch is very short, because for me, the period around my lunch break is actually at the time when I met my most productive, and that is good time that I don't want to waste.

So here's the one thing to know about coding.

Nobody counts the number of hours you work.

They don't count the number of hours you work.

They don't even care if you just take off the whole day and go work from home.

Or if you leave early, you can manage your time however you want.

It's not like working as a cashier, where you get paid by the hour or working as a waiter.

That is what time is so valuable as a programmer.

Your personal time is essentially mixed with your professional business.

Time coding is generally not talent based.

There's one single bottle neck, and it is your amount of time that you're willing to put in.

The more time you have the better of a programmer.

You're going to be generally speaking, right, because a lot of it is simply based on learning some new system, some a p i some framework gathering as much knowledge as you can, just knowing as much as you can about various systems.

I remember several years ago I would go out for lunch every single day, and I would just go to Chipotle's right.

You the imagine that would be pretty fast, but it turned out it would take me like 30 minutes to drive over there in mid day traffic, maybe another 2030 minutes to order the food and consuming and then another 30 minutes to get back.

And intel, though that burns like 90 minutes of the day.

By the time I got back, it was usually like 1 30 2 p.m. Sometimes I realized it was just burning tons of valuable time.

And not only that, if I happened to eat a lot, I would get sleepy during the midday.

So these days I would recommend that if you're serious about becoming a programmer than some good habits to get our shortening your lunch break and eating less of that if possible, now.

Another thing I would actually do, and this applies to anybody is that when you wake up, you plan out your date during breakfast, right?

And it's even better if you can think about that the night before.

There's a 1,000,000 things that you could do right.

You could sit there and dig deep into some smaller those strange bug that you found.

You could read a bunch of documentation about something you could develop some useless feature that nobody's going to care about.

There's usually a list of, say, 100 different bugs that you can go off and self, but this is really about prioritizing that.

Hold this of things that you want to be doing and also kind of goes back to how you schedule your day and make sure that you have blocks of time to coat right.

If you just approach the day in the half, answered way and you don't really plan it out, then it's not going to be likely that you'll be able to have chunks of time to code, and you'll probably be working on things that aren't really worth while working on.

Like, for example, halfway through the day, somebody may say, Hey, they're going to the mall.

And it's very easy to say, Yeah, you're just gonna go check that out Or some people are going to the beach is like, Oh, that sounds fun.

Why don't you just go check that out, too?

When you think about the day and you plan that beforehand, you can says some longer term goes that are going to make you happier over the long run, right?

So if you think yourself well today, if you were to just power through that day and figure some project them by the end of the day, you would be able to say for yourself that you got this one thing crossed off your checklist and it would be done and that feeling of satisfaction, that reward would draw you into completing that work.

And then when you think about what, would you rather go spend half a day at the beach?

Or would you rather that some project that you really want to get off the ground complete and done?

You may actually elected do that project because it just sounds much more fulfilling to you.

You know, I tend to be highly suspicious of programmers who don't drink coffee and who don't drink tea.

And this is one of the top interview questions.

I will actually ask people, because if you're not drinking anything, then what are you doing at the computer?

Are you just sitting there typing for hours at the time?

Or are you sipping on something kind of fun?

This is also one reason I would highly recommend a coffee break.

I take mine at about 3 p.m. Every single day.

So here's the way I see it right after lunch time.

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My daily routine as a programmer (for software engineers)

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