Iāve been thinking about this for quite some time, but Dan Kimās Signal v. Noise piece on āfull stack developerā finally prompted me to write down some of the, uhh, results.
Having first gotten a taste of programming when I was some seven or eight years old, the word Iād initially learned to describe the person doing it was āprogrammerā. It seemed rather appropriate, and, well, still does.
Sometime after that Iād caught wind of ādeveloperā and no, I donāt think it was thanks to Steve Ballmer. Iāve spent much of my professional career calling myself this.
In the last few years, however, āengineerā has come to the forefront. As a result, Iāve now got the impression that weāve starting taking ourselves too seriously, guilty as I may be of using it as well.
Iāve now gone full circle back to āprogrammerā. It honestly just seems the most accurate.
I associate ādeveloperā with construction and āengineerā with building physical things pretty heavily. I realize this is probably not be universal at all, but I find āprogrammerā to be the one I can explain best.
Since Iām most definitely not a lexicographer, Iāll just go with that. Maybe Iāll also emphasize the things I actually know, like Python, just to be clear explicit.