On being a coder, regardless of role

Every few years there’s a fight about what to call ourselves. Software Engineer. Developer. Test Engineer. SDET. SRE. AI Engineer. Each one has a flavour, a salary band, a LinkedIn cohort, a set of conferences.

The honest version, for me: I’m a coder.

I’ve worked in QA for most of my career, mostly in healthcare, mostly automating things that nobody enjoys testing manually. The work is real, the systems are gnarly, and the constraints (HIPAA, X12, hospital uptime) are unforgiving in a way that quietly forces you to become a better engineer than the title suggests.

But I also write code outside of that. Side projects, small tools, weekend learning, things that have no commercial reason to exist. That’s not a hobby tacked onto a “real” job; it’s the same thing my day job is, just without the meetings.

So the choice this site makes — and I made it deliberately — is to skip the role-shaped framing entirely. I’m not the QA guy. I’m not the SDET trying to become a Software Engineer. I’m not the Software Engineer with a healthcare specialization. I’m someone who likes writing code, has spent eight years getting reasonably good at a particular slice of it, and is still curious about the rest.

Which, when I write it out, is just: a coder.

If that’s a less marketable framing than “Senior Software Engineer specializing in X” — fair. I’ll trade some recruiter clarity for the freedom to put up whatever I make next, regardless of which job description it fits.