I read this article a few months ago, The 10 types of programmers you’ll encounter in the field. Wanted to blog about it but didn’t have the time. Quite funny but true. From those types I believe I’m a combination of The Ninja, The Theoretician, and The Evangelist. I am The Evangelist most of the times. I like/love management, leading people, making things easy for everyone, improving the software development process, and making things happen. But I don’t usually get the opportunity to do so, or just not enough. I guess in the midst of things, I am usually overlapped or underestimated. Amazingly, I do know people who exclaim that I have inspired them. Very gratifying. I hope you’d experience it too.
Before I was mostly The Evangelist, I was The Ninja. Code and code all day long until the next day. I remember good ol’ iThink days when my working schedule was 8am to 6am. I was a lone warrior, and still am in times of need. From The Ninja’s description “The Ninja is your team’s MVP, and no one knows it.”, yep, I do get that every time. We ninjas don’t get rewarded or credited for our work. We don’t need it. But in the real world, an employee does need it sometimes. That’s part of management principles’ “taking care of your employees”. This is actually my main reason why I’m thinking of going back to designing (web design and flash dev) which I was really good at in college. People in designing get noticed and are rewarded greatly like my friend, Mike, who’s getting 25k every month. Cool.
The Theoretician. I am a researcher, a scientist by heart. Always finding the true solution which is never there. That is, for me there is no true solution or real truth in the IT field. Makes me wonder why Computer Science is called a science. As Grissom said, Science is about truth. Right, but that’s another story. Being The Theoretician I believe is both my bad and good quality. I get distracted easily, especially when I’m debugging another programmer’s code which is very very low down in the optimization department. Or is just downright dirty, wrong, and full of loopholes. In the end, I redo or fix the code which took a lot of time and effort. Very bad if you’re in a deadline, and good if you have nothing else to do or can’t do nothin’ for that matter. For the uninitiated, this is type of work is called refactoring. Nevertheless, I take pride in what I do. Except those code that I had to slip in when I only have 5 minutes to do it. ^_^x
Being a combination of The Ninja, The Evangelist, and The Theoretician has made me always love to be in the Research & Development department. If such as department really exists. I am a framework and software engineering addict. Microsoft Enterprise Library, NUnit, Joomla!, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, SubSonic, and Castle Project are just one of the few things I’ve been to. And I’m still not quite satisfied. SiteCore, ZendFramework, and CodeIgniter are my next targets. Yum, yum. So many things to do, so little time.
How about you? What type of programmer are you?