Okay, so what constitutes "doing it"?
Does someone who uses designs an Excel spreadsheet or a simple webform that sends some unformatted mailto qualify? Because I think it does.
Discussion
Right in the moment you instruct a computer to do something. Doesn't matter how you do it, Excel, Assembler, Python, Java, or what ever, they are just tools.
Are developers and programmers different then…?
This is why I’ve always found software engineer to be a better description of what we get up to than developer tbh
Developer is so vague. Everyone is talking about different things.
I stick to my self proclaimed systems engineer title. I like engineering systems. That’s what I do day in day out
I'm so much all over the place that I'm struggling to even define what I do.
I consider the programming I do for the actual product to also just be "helping out" because we're short on staff. It all feels like I'm just bringing people coffee, or something, but digital.
Impostor syndrome is real and an issue
What do you work on?
At the moment? Trying to get my laptop to a point where I can compile something on it. Just switched computers, when I gave up my job.
For the project? I did a lot of design and now I'm working on an OpenAPI and a CLI, both in Python. And a bot and a relay, and I'm thinking about adding some nodes to our remote server (Bitcoin, Lightning, and eCash mint).
But I've gotten side-tracked with writing a simple Nostr client, just to try it out. Feel like that's some sort of right-of-passage that I skipped, and I should know how it works.
"Developer" comes from "Research and Development" or R&D. They're the people who take the ideas from the researchers and try to pour them into marketable solutions.
"Programmers" just program. They write some code.
Not all developers are programmers. Not all programmers are developers.
This is some big brain stuff 🧠
It's the same thing, but "programmer" is an older term. They needed a new name to make young React.js programmers feel better about themselves, so they invented "developer".
I've always thought of "developer" more like a job title and "programmer" more like an activity.
I'm usually programming things that aren't an essential part of the final, shipable product, that the end-user interacts with, so I don't call myself a developer. ORMs and databases and test automation, and stuff. I've only done bug fixes on core, when someone else was sick or on vacation, or something.
In my opinion a programmer is a special kind of developer. Programming is a way to develop software, but not the only (again, I am not judging the quality of the result!).