[julesbond007]

By saying you don't want to be a real programmer, I'm hoping you don't mean a good/great programmer.

Isn't it interesting how we're telling everyone to learn how to code, but then people feel like impostors? Well you can't learn good programming and cs standards in a few days or weeks, even in a few years. So no wonder a lot of people feel like impostors.

Having said that, it takes quite some time to really develop as a software engineer into a real software engineer. You need to know architecture, design, best decisions, security, caching and more. That's what I call a real programmer. Can you design a search service? If you can't, can you learn enough to design it? How would you even start? Everyone can code, but not everyone can design a system that is scalable, fast, robust and secure.

In addition, to be a real programmer, I think you need to start thinking about the future...how will people want to use a browser in the future? If I'm a developer, how can I make XYZ easier and faster to build for other developers? How can I make it so that the code is reusable? Will a framework make it easy? How should that framework be built? How are people going to use it? Etc...

Some of it is deliberate thinking and some of it is work experience.

So a lot of this kind of thinking comes from real problems software engineers faced while working. Discussions, debates, etc... They found a solution and it was elegant enough for others to use.

That's how I think someone goes from an impostor to a real programmer.