Whats your identity?

We have many identities, identity for work, identity for friends and a different identity for home. But, I want to write about the developer identity, what is your software developer identity?

I recently read a blog post from Sittiphol Phanvilai with the title “Introduce yourself as a single message” … A secret of identity building. and sort of came to the same conclusion.

Just 10 years ago there weren’t as many frameworks and programming languages as there are now. Back then you could easily say that I have worked with this, this, this and this technology. I also used to say the same exact thing. But now, the times have changed and everyday there is a new framework or a programming language. Its hard to keep up to date with all of them. In my opinion what matters now is that you should know how to acquire a certain skill rather than knowing the complete skill in depth.

I self taught myself Android development but then I started my career as a C# and ASP.Net developer. At that time my android skills weren’t as polished so my developer identity was a web developer for ASP.NET. You always have multiple identities, though it also depends on the context, for my second job, I was looking for mobile app development jobs, so at that time my developer identity was that of an Android developer. So, depending on the context you should represent your strongest identity with which you can related to the discussion at hand. If I meet someone now and they tell me if they work on Angular, I would say “High five! I am also and Angular developer!”, since it is my strongest identity to connect with.

TLDR; You should represent your strongest developer identity with which you can related to the discussion at hand.