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[kerryjoy]

That awkward in-between stage? Yeah, every dev’s been there. You’re patching up bugs for your cousin’s blog, slapping together half-baked apps, maybe even wrangling React just enough to make your portfolio look “legit”—but when someone asks what you do, suddenly you turn into the most humble person on Earth. “Oh, I’m just... learning to code,” you mumble, as if you’re waiting for some grand wizard to bop you on the head and knight you “Official Programmer.” Spoiler: there is no wizard.

It’s not about skill, really. It’s this weird identity crisis. You see those folks on Twitter or GitHub—like, what are these people, code poets? Their commits look like art, they’re dropping words like “monad” and “idempotency” over their third espresso, and meanwhile, you’re sweating bullets Googling “why is async so weird.” Pretty sure every dev has their “impostor” phase. No one talks about it, but trust me, even that dude with a million stars on GitHub once stared at a blank VS Code window thinking, “Am I ever gonna pull this off?” But hey, they kept showing up. Kept writing code that looked like spaghetti. That’s the game.

The real magic? It’s not some fancy certification or a job title. One day you catch yourself fixing some obscure bug or freestyling a feature, and suddenly you realize: you’re not just copying tutorials anymore. You’re actually making stuff. You’re making choices, not just following instructions. That’s when it creeps up on you—you’re a programmer, whether you’ve got the badge or not. Wild how that moment sneaks past you, though. Maybe it’s because we’re all waiting for someone else to tell us we belong. But honestly? You already do.

 

[perlcode]

Well... there is no binary answer for this. A good rule of thumb is to not go around saying "I am a programmer!" as a form of bragging. Like all kinds of bragging, this could go wrong if you stumble upon someone with much bigger knowledge and experience than you.

If you program as a job, or as a dedicated hobby, you could call yourself a programmer, why not? However, it's important to be specific about the kind of programming you do.

For example, I am a Ruby on Rails programmer, I like to learn a lot about Rails project structure, good Ruby gems, RESTful programming, MVC, RSpec, and related technologies.

If you come to me and ask "Hey, programmer dude, can you crack that .exe file?" I will have to answer with "Sorry bro, not my area, I know nothing about binary files." And that's okay, for me. Maybe someday I will learn about it, but I don't strictly NEED TO, right now.