A lot of people say that I'm not really a programmer. There are other things that are interesting to me, like data science, data visualization, and math. Maybe you're like me too: maybe you're comfortable writing whatever code to solve whatever problems you're having, whether it involves web programming, javascript, python, or just a single line of awk, but you don't have a "proper" background in computer science.
But recently I realized that this wasn't what they meant. What people really meant to say was that I am not an engineer. An engineer is someone who builds things, and building software quickly often means churning out a lot of code. There are many friends of mine who can do this very well, and it's very useful. Sure I can build things too, but not at their speed.
I'm a different kind of programmer. I'm a problem solver. I like to look at a nontrivial problem on software, and come up with ways to solve it with a minimal amount of code change. If you're looking at a really hard problem that people around you would write a lot of code to solve, and you wake up one morning with a much easier solution, then perhaps this is your style too.
A lot of programmers I know falls into one "type" or another. The two aren't really mutually exclusive (especially since good Engineering is supposed to involve good abstraction and thus less code). It's probably also determined by people's preference about the kind of things they like to do, how they approach problems, and what they find more rewarding. Building new things is really fun and writing lots of code makes you feel productive, while doing problem solving makes you feel clever when you count the lines of code you didn't write.
I happened to find the latter more rewarding. So, I'm a programmer who counts the lines of code that I didn't have to write.
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