Programmer-writer

My favorite label right now for what I do¹ is programmer-writer.

I first saw it in Jason Kehe’s WIRED profile of Robin Sloan. The article is titled “The Tech World’s Greatest Living Novelist Goes Meta,” and it’s not just a profile—it’s a profile about profiling Sloan, mostly full of Kehe’s inner monologue:

Just give him some impressive-sounding title that can’t be ignored. “The quintessential Bay Area author,” say—but less local. Or “the programmer-writer’s programmer-writer”—but less esoteric. Oh, that’s it: He’s “the tech world’s greatest living novelist.”

I think he should have called it “The programmer-writer’s programmer-writer.” Anyhoo, after I saw that I came to like the label. It’s helpful to have a name or mental model for an archetype or phenomenon you’ve observed.

What is a programmer-writer? Someone who writes and programs and writes about programming². Who is a programmer-writer? Maggie Appleton and Tom MacWright are two of my favorites, but there are so many more great ones, of course.

Programmer-writer as a label is kind of like design engineer. Maggie is both (!), so I guess that makes her a designer-programmer-writer or something, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Maybe I’ll make a list of programmer-writers like her collection of design engineers.

Footnotes

(1) What do I do now? I’m writing a book about domains. I also code: on the book’s website, its email newsletter system, and research experiments.

(2) Do I just mean programmers who blog? Maybe! But again, I find labels helpful sometimes. Like, recently I read Steve Krouse’s find a model blog post (Steve is another great p.-w.), and even though I already used that technique sometimes, I started thinking to use it more once it became a thing with a name in my head.