Is there? I’m not always so sure there is. It’s mystical. I once read an article in a US Army newspaper about the mythical “real Army.” This Army that all of the veterans talked about at the Moose lodge. His conclusion at the end of the article was that there was no such thing. This supposed real Army was merely an ideal created by people in order to, for lack of a better reason, impress newbies and those to afraid to try it for themselves. Which then leads me back to my question… err my real question. Am I real programmer? I mean what makes me a “real programmer?”
If you base your opinion of my abilities off my blog or the sad amount of code I have on GitHub you’d probably say no, and if that’s all you have to go on I can’t say I blame you for thinking that way. But what about all the code I write at work that I can’t show you? Is it enough to make me a real programmer?
For example; I wrote a PL/SQL package to pull all the escheated payments (which is a misnomer from an accounting standpoint) from my company’s convoluted all-in-one software. Was it enough? It had all the good things that PL/SQL has, selects, updates, inserts, it has cursors, and loops, along with if-then statements. It has case statements nested into select queries. It has dynamic SQL and custom error messages (which in this context sounds trivial
trust me it’s not though). Is that real programming though?
I’m currently in the process of writing a website to help with budget planning. It’s got everything a good .NET website has. C#, ASP, and lot’s of libraries and references. I wrote a custom class inside it’s own custom namespace to facilitate the passing of queries to an Oracle database. It’s got all the classics to of course. Variables, if-then-else statements. It’s got various bits of ASP code (which sucks by the way, holy cow). I’m currently working on using LINQ to make custom grids full of financial data. Is that enough?
Somedays I have the screw attitude. It doesn’t matter what other people think. But then somedays it’s not about what they think. It’s what I think. I suppose it’s a matter of self confidence in the end.
Enjoy the Penguins!