designer, programmer or developer?

[opifex]

I posted this in a different thread to address a point of contention, but the reality of what each of us does can be seen it this "quote" adapted from real life scenarios:

... the web designer says, "oh, yes we can do that... and what else do you want to add to the page design?"
... the web programmer says, "yes, well, maybe we can do that, but....."
... and the web developer says, "here's what you asked for and it works."

I am a developer.

well, who are you?

** the term "webmaster" is deliberately omitted due to the continuous evolution of the term!

[ZeroKilled]

well, i really don't know what i am! ^_^'
i studied technology in audiovisual communication and they taught me graphic design for advertisement (among other thing). before having the principle of graphic design, i studied web design and programming with javascript, but did it just for fun, by myself and with the aid of internet. so, you probably say what i am!

[Shorts]

I too go by the definition of developer.

My designs are simple and straight forward with a focus on functionality. Same with my programming :]

Although at my job I am now the only one allowed to touch the front-end (XHTML, CSS, and AJAX).

Went to school for fine art, have been programming on my own since '97.

[starheartbeam]

well my title is web developer and in a lot of way I am but I am also like the programmer.
so I fall somewhere in the middle of programmer and developer!

[Dok]

How do you define the difference between a programer and a developer? Where I live those two words would have the same meaning in this context.

[LeeU]

Well, actually a designer and developer are two different positions, although you could be doing both. It's like an interior designer and a building contractor.

[scragar]

I figure I'm balanced between programmer and developer, I do enjoy the fact that I can see problems in things before I start writing them, but once I've got what I see as being the problems solved I can pretty much just dive in and produce a piece of code to be run without any extra complexity.

[opifex]

How do you define the difference between a programer and a developer?

I think what it really comes down to is that a "developer" does have both design and programming skills - AND has the ability to combine these skills to achieve a balanced and functional end product.

in my case -

i'm not really a very good layout designer - i'm adequate at best. probably because my design ideas are constrained by my personal sense of funcionality.

i am a programmer. too many years of experience and far too many programming languages. i am NOT the programmer in the original scenario - "but" doesn't exist as an operator! so i wouldn't use the word in programming context

i am a good developer, probably because i understand my strengths and weaknesses in the skills i have. experience counts of course and contributes a a great deal to the way i do things... i apply what i have learned from my mistakes over the years.... lots of them!

[Ness_du_Frat]

For my part...
I'm a bad designer, a bad programmer and a bad developer :) But everything added together, I guess I'm not THAT bad.
But I think if I must choose, I'd go for developer.

[NogDog]

Eh, it's all just jargon and nit-picking. I'm whatever you want to call me as long as you'll pay me for whatever the heck it is I do. :p

In the greater IT world I've known many programmers who preferred to be called "software engineers", even though they did not actually have any sort of degree in engineering, but it sounded like it meant they knew more than mere "programmers". I've even known programmers who like being called a "hacker", embracing the aspect of it meaning someone who can make code do whatever they want it to, as opposed to the malicious "cracker" connotation of the term.

So call yourself whatever you think the people who will pay you want to hear, but personally I don't care. I'm not going to hire someone who calls himself a "developer" over someone who calls himself a "programmer" unless and until I've convinced myself he is, in fact, the better person for the job.

But that's just me; your mileage may vary.

[opifex]

agreed, nogdog! titles are just titles....
i've had all kinds of job titles in 30 years of working in the computer / electronics / information tech fields.
today apart from being a "web developer", i run my company and teach at university level.

so for this theme, i'm a developer... and you, what do you call yourself?

[Sunny G]

Yar, I be a scurvy designer.
The graphical portion is my forte', followed by programming. CSS, then comes the server-side-what-have-you.

[NogDog]

r... and you, what do you call yourself?

I thought about calling myself a "back-end specialist", but people might get the wrong idea. :rolleyes:

Really, I've not given it much thought, but it would probably have the word "developer" in it more often than not: "web developer", "PHP/MySQL developer", "internet solutions expediter", "computer geek" . . . take your pick.

[Shorts]

Well, according to my business card I am a Renaissance Man! :D

http://www.mullanaphy.com/images/bc_front.jpg (erased my number from the card).

On the back is a list of the main things that I did when freelancing. Everything from programming front-ends\back-ends, teaching chess, computer repairs, printed media, etc...

Might not be the best in any one field, but damn I'm good at most things... Humble too! :D

[opifex]

"Renaissance Man" is exceptionally cool!
i'm waiting to print my new cards because i'm moving and changing my phones.....
normally i don't put a title - just my name, but was thinking about putting something great like that. "Hombre del Renacimiento" wouldn't work though.

[NogDog]

Job title for your new cards:

[opifex]

not bad at all!!!

[Shorts]

:D

Well opifex, you can use the term "Polymath" ;)

[xvszero]

I consider myself a programmer, mostly because as hard as I try I can't actually grasp good design. It's more an art than anything else, and though I consider myself a pretty solid musician / song-writer, I've never been too great at visual arts. But I am a pretty darn good programmer, I think. At least, I've never gotten a request I couldn't figure out.

I thought about calling myself a "back-end specialist", but people might get the wrong idea. :rolleyes:

Yesterday at work my boss said something about me not being able to design sites and I said "that's because I prefer the back end to the front end" and he said "I'll bet you do" and everyone started laughing. GOOD TIMES.

[opifex]

i think i'll just leave it without a title like always.
just the logo, company name and mine. i do add the title "Ing." (Ingeniero) (engineer in english) as is customary. the new cards for everybody else will be the same - even for the designers - with "Lic." (Licenciado(a)) for them.

My card and university letterhead have Ing. ____ _____ __ with Profesor de Sistemas Informáticas e Ingeniería Electrónica as the position title.

...and most people just stop a "professor"... the rest is a waste of ink.
like when I was the "Senior Systems Engineer" for a fairly well known US company in the 80's... nobody outside of the field had a clue what the job title meant! (even some of the company's employees!)

"job titles" can definitely be confusing!

[Dok]

Well....I would not say a web developer is the same as a programmer. The way I percieve it a programmer has a solid acedemic foundation in computer science or computer engeneering.

A web developer is usually a person who started out doing design, then moved to something more technical but without attending to the intricate computer science details.

JavaScript is a good example of this...most people asking in the JavaScript forum don't have the slightest idea how to structure programs or how programming languages work in general...usually because they don't have a background in science.

For the record I'm not trying to bash any of these two side...just how I percieve the difference. Both sides have qualities the other side doesn't have.

[opifex]

i started out in electronics and programming.... added networks, user interfaces, controls...
arpanet, BBS, usenet .... all before there existed the "internet"....
so in my case at least programming and hardware precede "web"
i am still involved in programming apart from the web.

as far as "academic foundation" goes.... the majority of the "computer science or computer engineering" curriculum don't really prepare you for much if you don't start applying what you learned in the real world and keep up to date on your own.

my "formal" training in FORTRAN, COBOL and LISP don't have much relevance today

[scragar]

my "formal" training in FORTRAN, COBOL and LISP don't have much relevance today

lisp is still good for a number of things, and for complex maths with little interactivity or displaying work, fortran rocks.

And I wanna change my answer to mu, none of those options is exactly me enough to say it's right.

[opifex]

i agree that fortran and lisp are still useful!!! and they are still part of some courses (i include LISP) but for "web" development and "PC" development they have fallen off the map.

how many of you have had "formal" training in what you use for the web?
(x)html, xml, perl, python, ruby, php, java, asp, .com, .net, javascript, AJAX?

probably not many.... most schools won't include courses. some schools do carry MS courses that are full of deprecated coding practices... such as where i teach. it took a bona fide miracle to expand the curriculum!

so if you didn't learn in school. how did you learn?
probably like me... on your own and as the job/project required it?

[Shorts]

I totally concur.

Personally have done zero schooling for any type of computer activity.

Schooling was in fine art. Got involved with computers when I was about 12, we had 2 computers that were both broken and my dad said no more computers. So I ended up building one out of the two.

Then websites started in October 1997. Friend had a Final Fantasy 7 website, told him I could make a better site. Started with ugly HTML (back then it was a complete Wild West approach to HTML). Then learned PERL to make Topsites sites and the works. Eventually on to PHP, JS, AJAX, CSS, XHTML, XML, etc.

[scragar]

hmn, off topic question, but I'm gonna try my best to answer it.

how many of you have had "formal" training in what you use for the web?
(x)html, xml, perl, python, ruby, php, java, asp, .com, .net, javascript, AJAX?

probably not many.... most schools won't include courses. some schools do carry MS courses that are full of deprecated coding practices... such as where i teach. it took a bona fide miracle to expand the curriculum!

so if you didn't learn in school. how did you learn?
probably like me... on your own and as the job/project required it?

There's formal training in writing them? I mean honestly, the closest I got to formal training was using front page in high school, when I left high school I started pick appart javascript on the web, learning HTML while I was at it, then I started college with a good(but many miles from perfect or even standards compliant) understanding of those 2, at college I met a friend who was into the same stuff, he taught me some PHP(computing at college taught VB, which I used as a leason in ASP, but it's a horrible language), I taught him what I knew, after the first year of college he left(he was already on his second year), so I was on my own for learning more, I picked up a book from the library on PHP, using that to teach myself some more stuff, left college, got a job after a really cool interview(guy wasn't phased when I mentioned that I had no actual demo's of my skills, he just turned around, gave me a pen and paper, and said something to the effect of "show my how to find a list of factors to a number"), got took on as an apprentice to their developer, learning under him. That's about it as far as training, outside of me doing stuff on my own goes, no qualifications :p


Oh, and I've often heard that formal programming is a bad thing(I've been chatting to one person doing a formal HTML course where they taught her to use frames and tables for layout :o ), I wonder why exactly they teach techniques that are so old and bad, at some point someone must have explained this to them, right?

[opifex]

well, this is the "coffee lounge" and i don't see why it can't be included.

but, it really is part of the whole theme ... design, programming and "development"

we all come from different backgrounds, have followed (or are following) different paths and have wound up in more or less the same place / same "profession". i really think that the "how" we got here is relevant to "what" we might call ourselves.

[xvszero]

I had an ASP class, that was formal training I guess. In ten weeks we learned what I probably could have taught myself in 10 hours though.

Most everything else I either came up with myself (a friend didn't believe me that I built my own message board without anyone telling me how and I was like why not? It's just syntax and basic logic) or well... learned from others on forums such as this one.

[Dok]

as far as "academic foundation" goes.... the majority of the "computer science or computer engineering" curriculum don't really prepare you for much if you don't start applying what you learned in the real world and keep up to date on your own.Very true - but you probably won't ever pick up on heaps, trees, optimization, sorting, hash tables, advanced data structures, matrixes, graph theory etc. if you have not met it in a formal class. Maybe you are not directly applying such theory in your dayly work but the whole way of thinking and designing systems is limited to your theoretical knowledge.
It's just syntax and basic logic
Syntax and semantics is really just the smallest part of programming

how many of you have had "formal" training in what you use for the web?
(x)html, xml, perl, python, ruby, php, java, asp, .com, .net, javascript, AJAX?The language itself is of minor importance and it is not an argument for not having formal training. I would say that any formal training would make you better.

Now I don't mean to offend anyone and I might be wrong but it seems the many of you take pride in not having had formal training. I certainly agree it is not nessesary for every programming task and I myself am also pround of the things I taught myself.

But wouldn't you agree that a formal class in computer science and system design would improve your overall skills?

Knowing database theory would help you optimize your queries for instance. How to apply indexes and how to perform effecient joins.

Knowing C is a great help for understanding JavaScript...not to mention any other language.

Knowing assembler at least gives you an idea of how math is undertaken by computers - and it all comes down to math anyway.

I am certainly no expert at any of these topics but the formal training I have had is of major importance in every program I write. Anyway if your skills are good enough and you find that the formal classes available to you is worthless (and indeed many are) then I recommend picking up some of the books your nearby university is teaching - you might be in for a surprise of how this knowledge can apply to most of the work you do :)

Just to clarify - I am not saying that I myself is a better programmer than any of you - I would be surprised if I was.

[xvszero]

Syntax and semantics is really just the smallest part of programming
The language itself is of minor importance and it is not an argument for not having formal training. I would say that any formal training would make you better.

Who said semantics? I said logic.

On a BASIC level, the language itself is of minor importance, since anyone can go look up specific syntax in a book, and most of what you do on a basic level is generally the same idea in any language. But having a sense of logic can go a long ways. 99% of times I ever get stuck on anything programming for my sites are A. design (I have little artistic sense at all) and B. when I can't mentally grasp exactly what steps I need to take. But once I write the steps out logically (pseudo code?) and can grasp what needs to happen logically, I rarely have trouble implementing it.

Keep in mind I'm talking about writing code for web forums and the likes, not writing applications for nuclear physicists to use.

Don't get me wrong, I think a formal education can help a lot. But I also think a lot of it is logic, and logic isn't programming specific. Actually at my school the class was part of the Philosophy department (though that seemed a bit odd to me, being that they are basically opposites, but I guess you still need sound logic to create valid, unprovable theories.) And some people have minds that can grasp logic naturally, while others really struggle with it.

For instance, the friend who didn't understand how I had programmed my own web forum was in all the same classes I was, got the same type of grades... but it just never clicked with him how to put it all together logically. Whereas I didn't even have to think twice about it, building a forum is pretty simple logic and uses fairly basic syntax, once I knew how to access databases and the likes it all made sense pretty quick.

I'm not trying to brag, I have a LONG ways to go before I can consider myself some kind of expert programmer. Or even some kind of intermediate programmer. I'm still basically a beginner, I just catch on fast when I need to. But anyway, teaching yourself doesn't necessarily mean just winging it solo, you still have books and help forums and other resources. For example, taking your index comment above... I've honestly learned more about setting up indexes correctly from a few help posts on forums than I did in my database class.

[scragar]

For instance, the friend who didn't understand how I had programmed my own web forum was in all the same classes I was, got the same type of grades... but it just never clicked with him how to put it all together logically. Whereas I didn't even have to think twice about it, building a forum is pretty simple logic and uses fairly basic syntax, once I knew how to access databases and the likes it all made sense pretty quick.

Back in my computing class at college my teacher was the same as your friend, he could tell you what functions or syntax code do what, but he missed basic logic, like how to remove an item from an array if sorting is unimportant(he would always remove the item, them move every item after it down, even though the order was unimportant), or would be confused as to why I would recommend placing error catching over math problems where you cannot be sure of the number origin(aka user entered, or from a file).

On the other hand he knew VB, so I'm not sure if that's a complaint against him or just what he had been taught.

[NogDog]

Ideally (though unfortunately not at all universal), a college degree in computer science should be teaching you the principles of computers and programming and -- perhaps most importantly -- how to learn in general. (This latter aspect applies to any college degree.) Specifics of any programming language then become irrelevant, as anyone with a good grasp of the principles and the ability to learn can then relatively easily learn any programming language that is currently popular or required for a particular job. After all, once you graduate, you could conceivably have 40 or more years of software development in your future, and you can be pretty sure that the languages of choice while you are in college will be long gone before you reach the second half of your career.

On top of all that, the fact is that some people are more naturally adept at programming than others (just as some people have more natural talent at music, athletics, verbal skills, etc.). Such people, with adequate self-motivation, can learn to be good programmers through self-learning. They may well become better programmers than those with a formal degree who do not have that combination of talent and motivation. However, that does not mean that the formal education is worthless. If that talented person is matched up with the correct set of good teachers and well-conceived curriculum, he should (at least in theory) become an even better programmer, in particular with regards to the more esoteric skills of system design and such which go beyond the scope of just learning specific programming languages' syntax.

[Dok]

Who said semantics? I said logic.My mistake. Sorry about that.