23 Oct 2009

by Marc

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About What I Do (for the layman)

What do you do?

I’m a Computer Shaman, (if you are a geek read up more here instead of this page). I didn’t coin this term and saw it on a post over at The Codist. In summary, anyone who does programming for a living and any of it’s related duties has a very hard time telling people what they do at a level the listener can relate to. For me, I’ve been using the following more often than anything else…

I spend 50% of my time identifying and documenting business problems and 50% of my time coming up with creative solutions and then building it.

However, this usually leads to more questions regardless of how a Computer Shaman puts it. The career of a Computer Shaman is one that includes all of the following titles to some degree while being knee deep with the day to day duties as well.

Industry Titles

  • Programmer
  • Coder
  • Developer
  • Software Engineer
  • Hacker
  • Architect
  • Technical Architect
  • Enterprise Architect
  • Software Architect
  • Analyst

Day To Day

  • Debugging
  • Writing Code
  • Memory Management
  • Testing
  • Deploying
  • Commenting
  • Documenting
  • Support
  • Bug Fixing
  • Compiling
  • Troubleshooting
  • Branching/Merging

I’ve been in IT professionally for 10 years now. A computer is a computer and as long as there is an interface for me to tell it what to do, I might as well be called a Computer Shaman. Thats the power and mysticism of it all. It’s a black box to most (or one of those silver things from Apple) and can be told exactly what I want it to do. It’s broad and deep and a blast at the same time.

Also, a really efficient Computer Shaman is also a very good Typist as Jeff Atwood puts it, and, the typing class I took in High School many moons ago has paid off VERY WELL!