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Discussion on: When Do You Become A Developer?

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Seth Jones

I think credentials or pedigree are sufficient for calling yourself a dev, but not necessary. There’s more than one path to “developer.”

I’m a bootcamp grad that has been coding 4-5 years, and I think for my first 2-3 years I didn’t consider myself a dev.

The point where that changed for me was when I became confident in my ability to learn just about anything, even if I had never seen it before.

After a while, just about everything “new” or “hot” started to have elements of familiarity, and I could draw parallels between those things and concepts I already knew. Rails vs Django (MVC), Vue vs React (component based js libraries), functions vs methods, classes, state management, props, for loops, conditionals, authentication, API, RESTful architecture, etc. These are all concepts that translate across tech, and once you’re familiar, everything else can be mastered with time.

For me, when knowing that I could learn just about anything if I gave it my time was the point where I considered myself a “dev.”