# The "different shades of work" in programming

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/the-different-shades-of-work-in-programming/328948>\
**Category:** random\
**Created:** [July 5, 2012, 6:16pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/the-different-shades-of-work-in-programming/328948 "2012-07-05T18:16:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![IQAndreas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/f08c70/32.png) [@IQAndreas](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/IQAndreas)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 6:16pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/the-different-shades-of-work-in-programming/328948/1 "2012-07-05T18:16:30Z")

</div>

I’m working on a blog post and trying to hammer out a very generalized list of the “shades of work” that you encounter while working on a project.

I have a few so far, so could anyone who understands what I’m trying to say help me add a few parts to the list that I may have missed?

**Prototyping** - “Playing around”, not really caring about structure and efficiency. Just testing to see if your idea will work. This part is usually the most fun.

**The meat and bones** - The “normal” code. Chugging along quite nicely, setting things up the way they should be and overall making good progress.

**The monotonous bits** - The boring, repetitious code that no one likes doing, but still needs to get done. Very little room for creativity or problem solving. Examples: menus, HTML forms, etc.

**The hiding bug** - For 6 hours I have been sitting with this code and cannot for the life of me figure out what is wrong? Why is this problem occurring?? It _should_ be working! (usually turns out to be a tiny typo somewhere)

There are more scenarios, such as “experimentation”, “clean up”, and “general problem solving”, but I can’t quite summarize those categories very well at the moment.

Any other ideas?