Programmers vs Coders — What’s the difference to me?

So you might have clicked on this article because you are curious. You are curious to know why someone would differentiate a programmer from a coder. You might be thinking “well aren’t they the same thing?” A lot of people do think they are. However in my eyes I see a big difference between a programmer and a coder. Let me explain.

Firstly let me define what a coder is to me. To me a coder is a specialist at, yeah you guessed it, coding. They generally have their own choice of language they know really well. They know it so well that they can almost tell you exactly the ins and outs of how that language works. They know all the available libraries that exist, and how to incorporate them all quickly to build something useful. They are usually seen as high performers to upper management, because they simply “get stuff done”. You can throw programming tasks at them, and they will churn out the code needed to build whatever feature you have in no time.

Sounds great yeah? Well sure. Coders can serve a purpose in your projects, however there is more to software, than just churning out code and putting it on a server to run (or client depending on what you are doing).

In my eyes a coder generally does not see the bigger picture, nor do they care to. They do not care about solving business problems with proper…