What do programmers actually do?

it has come to my attention that people are actually being inspired by me to study computer science or become software engineers which is terrifying so I have a degree in computer science but I work as a software engineer which includes but is not limited to programming I actually work as a manager now which includes even less programming but I digress so the world of programming is extremely broad but I get the feeling that most people learn to code with like one thing in mind usually like websites or video games or whatever so I figured I'd give a shallow dive on some of the areas of programming because each of these things is like so deep that you could spend your whole life doing it and never cross over into any of the other fields so I think the term programmer or software engineer is like it's too broad and kind of paints the wrong picture coding is so ubiquitous that I recommend at least being aware of this stuff even if you're not considering a lifelong career in software lifelong career I don't even know if I'm considering a lifelong career in software anyway let's just jump into it I sound like Philip DeFranco let's just jump into it anyway I feel like the easiest place to start with this is YouTube itself since we're already here now YouTube is owned by Google but it independently has nearly 2 billion users who come to watch videos every month which means a quarter of Earth's population watches videos on YouTube YouTube's headquarters is located in San Bruno California and that office holds about 2,000 people but because Google has offices everywhere and shares a lot of resources through all of its like companies it's easy to imagine that thousands of engineers have contributed to YouTube's codebase over the years a company like Facebook that has a bit over 2 billion users likes to boast that they have like one engineer per million users which means they're about 2,000 engineers working on the Facebook product directly and I think that's a reasonably safe assumption for YouTube as well I mean even Yelp where I used to work had under a hundred million users and nearly five engineers by the time I left so this isn't a wild estimate by any means but what could two thousand engineers be doing at YouTube it's just a website right people like to make that argument all the time and it really annoys me I could build Facebook in a weekend we don't care Tristan we're trying to watch Avengers jeez and to be fair that claim isn't particularly false web applications like Facebook and YouTube are not difficult to build superficially in 2018 YouTube is a web application which just means that it's an application that you use over the Internet but more specifically it means it comprises a front end and a back end the front end is the visual component of YouTube it's what you see using only HTML and CSS you could build an identical looking clone to YouTube but it wouldn't do anything YouTube has user accounts and video streaming and recommendations when you click on a video you're gonna want a video to play for that you're gonna need a back end if the front end is what you see the back end is what you don't see the back end of YouTube is responsible for holding those user accounts and storing those videos and streaming those videos it's also the thing that creates a custom version of YouTube's website so that when I go to my subscriptions page and you go to your subscriptions page we see different content with what we've described so far we have a Genki version of YouTube we can click on links and watch videos and view images and stuff this is how the original internet worked by the way without the video part it's just a bunch of hypertext documents linked together with hyperlinks hypertext by the way is the HT in HTTP and HTML in order to get dynamic experiences within YouTube like animations and being able to leave a comment without refreshing the page you're gonna need JavaScript JavaScript introduced dynamic behavior to the web back in 1995 with a web browser called Netscape Navigator 90s kids know what I'm talking about now javascript has spread like wildfire and people are spending their whole careers doing it it's like really evolved into like this whole thing okay so with our basic understanding of web applications on the front end and back end we can essentially build YouTube's MVP which stands for Minimum Viable Product by the way when we type youtube.com into a web browser and hit enter what we're essentially doing is asking YouTube for its website and web sites are just files that live on someone else's computer and the Internet is just a bunch of computers that can talk to each other to actually connect these computers and quickly safely reliably send data between them is a problem known as computer networking and there's a whole field for that and programmers work on that too they typically work at Internet Service Providers ISPs companies like Comcast and AT&T that provide the infrastructure that make the internet possible but some also work at companies like Google where they make Google's internal computers communicate more efficiently so anyway our basic version of YouTube was not particularly difficult to build but now we have to grow it and maintain it cuz there's a ton of websites on the Internet you don't just make the second most popular website in the world by just like making the website and like putting it out there there's millions of those essentially every piece that we've described at the YouTube application can have like infinite depth and nuance to it and it can hook into completely different fields of computer science like artificial intelligence there's this thing called the law of diminishing returns and it comes into play here god I sound so boring is this video boring let me know in the comments down below anyway the law of diminishing returns says you'll get less and less return on investment for the same resources it's like that BuzzFeed show worth it where they try food at three different price point like two dollar versus two thousand dollar Pizza turns out the two thousand dollar Pizza isn't a thousand times as good as two dollar pizza there's no way we could have known that and there's another thing happening here and I don't know if there's like a law for this but I saw a really good analogy essentially like a gallon of water is like really easy to hold but like millions of gallons of water required like a bunch of infrastructure in order to hold all that water in one place so that's also what's happening here anyway going back to YouTube it's gonna take more and more resources to make YouTube better and better we're gonna need a lot more resources to support two billion users then our like one-man show here and we've also gotta like do research and development and build new products we'll need people to babysit the computers that YouTube is running on because they will literally overheat and die if no-one pays attention to them then you're gonna need people implementing experiments on the platform to learn new ways to make it better which means you're gonna need a way to collect data from user behavior and then you need a storing process that what if I'm in Japan and my favorite cat video is in the US it actually takes much longer for a computer in Japan to talk to a computer in the States than it would if those computers were in the same country so maybe I want to make it so there's copies of my cat video in the US and Japan ads are a thing let's make money with that but what ads do we put in front of what videos that's a team right there now creators can make money on the platform great but we're gonna need a way for those creators to pay out so we're gonna have to like work with banks and payment systems wait now you can make money on YouTube great I'm a bad guy and I'm just gonna like make a bot that watches the ads on my own videos so that's fraud and that's illegal but we have to be the ones to catch it or else no advertisers are going to want to work with us and we can't make money so now we need a team to fight fraud maybe we get more people gauging with the platform if we recommended videos to watch instead of just serving them a static homepage how are we going to do that well with help from the artificial intelligence community they're over there teaching programs how to learn from their mistakes it's apparently called machine learning great let's hire some engineers who know about machine learning so they can teach a program about our users so that we can recommend new cat videos for them to watch while we're at it let's get some of those people to work on our ads oh and we're gonna need analytics dashboard so that we can figure out how our metrics are going well I don't know how to analyze that data can we hire a data scientist they can write programs that run analysis on our data and teach us things oh crap now we're too popular and we have too much data for us to process it's just too big that's where data engineers come in they can use advanced techniques for processing very large sets of data efficiently we need mobile apps they're all the rage now right yeah gotta get some people to build those now our back-end that previously only had to talk to our website has to talk to mobile clients as well and now we're probably gonna need people to oversee and design a way for our web and our mobile apps to talk to the same back-end that's called an API Oh No everything is breaking why is that I don't know people aren't perfect I guess and the code they're writing has mistakes in it that we don't notice until millions of people use the code in ways we didn't expect oh yeah you're gonna want to test your code wait so I have to write code to make sure that my code is doing what it's supposed to do yeah that's so meta and that's just YouTube maybe the internet isn't your thing and you'd rather play video games I hear fortnight's pretty cool how they do that lots of math and computer graphics also networking for multiplayer gross how about my microwave a programmer also worked on this it's an embedded system which means low-level code lives inside a chip inside of the microwave strange how about my Google home Internet of Things that's a combination of embedded systems and pretty much everything I said about YouTube's back in VR everything I said about graphics and math but more graphics in Madame's operating systems don't even get me started all right that's about all I had for today I just wanted to make a quick video this morning because I felt like it expects some exciting things next week please like this video comment on it share it with a friend subscribe Bell all that jazz see you next week [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 587,744

Rating: 4.9528995 out of 5

Keywords: jarvis, jarvis johnson, black youtubers, comedy, nerdfighter, programming language, georgia tech, software engineer, computer science, black software engineer, poc in tech

Id: FVdQETvHBoE

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ToyTronic]

Okay, maybe not “common”, but interesting none the less. He’s a backend python programmer working at Patreon.

This “every coding interview ever” is hilarious: https://youtu.be/wZR6QFE2m6o

And this video titled “How Youtube’s algorithm created Jake Paul” gives insights into Youtubes machine learning for Youtube’s recommend videos algorithm: https://youtu.be/2GYXemlyd_Q

[u/CASPER_777]

Neato