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A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer
Social media has a way of glamorizing everything, often hiding the reality behind the scenes. Nowhere is this more evident than in those “Day in the Life” videos of software engineers that you find on YouTube and Instagram.
I’m Asiqur, a college dropout turned Software Engineer at Codédex, and today, I’m giving you an unfiltered look at what my day-to-day actually looks like — building a tech startup while grinding toward my weight loss goals in the Big Apple.
Let's get into it.
^ The original video (110K+ views across platforms) that inspired this blog post.
#8:15 - 8:45 AM: Bzzzz Bzzzz
Starting off the day at 8:15 AM, waking up. 😴
That gives me a solid 30 minutes to be out the door to catch the 8:53 AM train.
To make sure I wake up, I set two types of alarms: one on my Amazon Echo and ten on my phone, spaced five minutes apart. Soo... I'm not really disciplined when it comes to waking up on time. I just brute force it lol.
#8:55 - 9:45 AM: Morning Commute
Since I live in Jersey City and the Codédex office is in DUMBO, Brooklyn, my commute (50 min) requires three transfers:
We are in the office on Tuesdays & Thursdays, so it's not that bad.
I’ll grab a black coffee from Joe's Coffee before heading into the office. Black coffee, which has less than 5 calories and is great for weight loss. More on that later! ☕️
#10:00 - 12:00 PM: Meetings, Meetings, Meetings
For the next two hours, I'm in meetings, dealing with different areas of the team. 🗓️
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Daily Standup (30 min)
Everyone saying, "Good on my end," and moving on... jk. This meeting is mainly about surfacing blockers and resolving them. It moves pretty fast, sometimes wrapping up in under 15 minutes.
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Curriculum Bi-Weekly (30 min)
Today's focus: deciding on our next course. The winner? Node.js (dropping soon 👀). I'm on the Eng team, but I sit in Curriculum team's meetings since we're a small team.
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Technical Content Sync (30 min)
A strategy session with Naomi, our Marketing Lead, on bringing more technical content to our social platforms. Spoiler: the ideas we brainstormed got scrapped unfortunately.
#12:00 - 2:00 PM: Smaller Tasks
The team headed out for lunch while I decided to stay back, mainly because, as an engineer, I haven't gotten real engineering work done yet due to those meetings. 💀 I wanted to use this time to get some smaller items done so I can focus on some bigger projects later on.
One of those smaller items dealt with decreasing the load times of our Challenge Packs. Sometimes they would take 3-4 seconds to load, which was really bad UX. So some refactoring was done, and the speed was drastically improved.
Below is the before vs. after:
When the team came back, they brought me back a coffee and yogurt, which I estimated to be 300 calories, bringing my calorie intake so far to 305, including the morning coffee.
#2:00 - 3:00 PM: Product Brainjam
The final meeting of the day was a product meeting. Discussing our roadmap for Q1 2025 (which is January + February + March): what to prioritize, when to ship, etc.
Some of those items included:
You can see everything that we shipped this month in the January Changelog.
#3:00 - 7:00 PM: Deep Work
The rest of the day consists of getting some deep work done, removing any blockers for myself or other teammates, shipped some papercuts and fixed some bug reports, and calling it a day around 7 PM. 🧑🏽💻
#7:00 - 9:30 PM: Commute Home
Heading back home is an hour ride where I just spam Juice WRLD on repeat. 🎧
If you don't know who that is, try "Wandered to LA".
By the time I'm home, it's 8 PM, and I'll spend the next hour and a half decompressing and getting something to eat.
Which was a yogurt bowl:
- 170g non-fat yogurt (90 cals)
- 1 scoop Whey protein (110 cals)
- 30g of Almonds (200 cals)
Totaling my daily calorie intake to 845 calories. Which is all I'll have for the day. A bit more on this below.
#9:30 - 11:00 PM: GYM TIME
Because I'm on a weight loss journey, I try to exercise 4-5 times a week for at least 90 minutes. Which I split into two sections:
- 😅 45 min of cardio, treadmill, stair masters.
- 🏋️♂ 45 min of weights.
For the weights, I honestly don't know what each of the exercises is called lol. But I try to do 4-6 variations with the dumbbells and machines.
With this routine and 700 calorie a day restriction, I managed to lose nearly 100 pounds over the course of a year. Obviously, I'm not perfect every day, but I try to stick to it and make up for it the next day if I miss a gym session or go over my calorie restriction.
You can read more about it in this post.
#11:00 - 12:30 AM: Recharge a Little
Heading back home, taking a quick shower, and doomscrolling Twitter for 20 minutes.
At this point, some of y'all might think that I don't have a life outside of work. Well, you're not entirely wrong. 😅 But it’s not as bad as it sounds, because for me, this is all just a game.
What do I mean by that? By nature, I’m ridiculously competitive. Whatever I get into, I push to be the best. Whether that's becoming valedictorian (before my dropout phase 😂), ranking in the top 30 in Overwatch, or now, navigating the startup world.
Building a tech company is the ultimate competition. Every single day, you’re battling to outperform both yourself and everyone else in the space.
Each milestone we hit feels like lvling up in a game — shipping a new product feature, securing a round of funding, or even just making it through another day. Every win delivers that dopamine hit, and in the startup world, there’s always another checkpoint ahead.
From my perspective, I’m just an addict in an endless adventure (that I enjoy immensely) working on a platform that I wish I had, with some of the best teammates in the game. 🔥
#12:30 - 3:00 AM: Niteowl'ing
This is early-stage startup, which means the grind never stops. For every successful company you see, there's a graveyard of a hundred others.
To make sure Codédex isn’t one of them, we push forward relentlessly — even when it feels unnecessary. That means burning the midnight oil to ship a product feature a day early into the hands of users, fixing a bug report that < 5% of users will notice, or grinding through tasks that might not seem urgent, but add up in the long run. Everything matters.
During these hours, I'll be working on the foundations for the next big project, fixing bugs, or just prepping notes for the next day's meetings. I usually try to call it around 2 AM, but today, it ends up being 3 AM. Tomorrow's WFH, so it's fine.
Time to pass out... 💤💤💤
So that’s a day in the life of a software engineer building a startup, office day edition! ✅
Thank you for reading! The next one might be the WFH edition, which I’ll probably drop in the OPC, so feel free to follow me there @asiqur.
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