{"id":871,"date":"2012-05-22T21:12:28","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T03:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=871"},"modified":"2012-05-22T21:12:28","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T03:12:28","slug":"what-is-the-difference-between-a-developer-and-a-programmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/871","title":{"rendered":"What is the difference between a developer and a programmer?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my mind, developers have skills that are a superset of the skills of a programmer.<\/p>\n<p>Programmers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>understand how software works<\/li>\n<li>think about the best way to solve problems they are presented with<\/li>\n<li>write good code<\/li>\n<li>learn new techniques, languages and manners of creating software<\/li>\n<li>write documentation<\/li>\n<li>write tests<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Developers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>do all of the above<\/li>\n<li>work with the business to define requirements<\/li>\n<li>test beyond basic unit tests, up to and including user acceptance testing<\/li>\n<li>understand basic system administration<\/li>\n<li>do basic database tuning<\/li>\n<li>deploy software and solutions<\/li>\n<li>can do some UX design<\/li>\n<li>can manipulate graphics<\/li>\n<li>support and maintain what they&#8217;ve written<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In other words, developers can span the gamut of needs&#8211;they are jack of all trades. \u00a0Not all positions are fit for developers because they can be a mile wide and an inch deep, but in general having someone who can handle the entire software lifecycle is more useful in more situations than having someone who is handed a spec and can crank out code.<\/p>\n<p>(Note that I&#8217;ve never worked in a huge company for longer than a few months, so perhaps that is where programmers are more useful.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my mind, developers have skills that are a superset of the skills of a programmer. Programmers: understand how software works think about the best way to solve problems they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-technology-and-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":873,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions\/873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}