Programmer Skills and Architypes

Serendipity at work! I was drafting a post on a hierarchy of programming skills. I made some notes and came up with a list of about 7 levels of skills. In no particular order, they are:

  • Writing code
  • Writing tests for code
  • Refactoring (making it better) to make code easier maintain
  • Using idioms of the language
  • Reading good code
  • Writing about code (blogging)
  • Building useful tools and applications

While browsing through a list of tweets, I stumbled upon this cool post on “Three programming Tribes”https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/

I think there’s fundamentally 3 architypes of programmers, divided by which ideals we hold in highest esteem:

  • You are a poet and a mathematician. Programming is your poetry
  • You are a hacker. You make hardware dance to your tune
  • You are a maker. You build things for people to use