One I've been asked a surprising amount, usually with family with less exposure to software development roles.
I regard myself professionally as: a developer. I could substitute "software engineer" here for all intents and purposes, IMO, but I appreciate brevity and "developer" does the job. I would call myself a "web developer", since I primarily work for the web as the delivery mechanism and/or platform, but I'm also "full-stack" in that I work with my database, ACL, server settings and configurations, reverse proxies, configurations, and things like HTTPS/SSL certificates.
The long-winded version is I'm a "software developer", with an emphasis on certain portions of my stack(s), but I'm a developer first, who works with users/customers, reads documentation, learns and adapts to APIs, along with best practices, and uses the tools at his hands or, as the case may be, writes a tool to do what I need.
Aside: some people in the C.S. field put a stigma on "web development" like it's a horrible beast we should never discuss, but based on the results from the 2017 StackOverflow Developer Survey (developer type) results, I'd say that 72% of development being for the web is a pretty significant portion.
One I've been asked a surprising amount, usually with family with less exposure to software development roles.
I regard myself professionally as: a developer. I could substitute "software engineer" here for all intents and purposes, IMO, but I appreciate brevity and "developer" does the job. I would call myself a "web developer", since I primarily work for the web as the delivery mechanism and/or platform, but I'm also "full-stack" in that I work with my database, ACL, server settings and configurations, reverse proxies, configurations, and things like HTTPS/SSL certificates.
The long-winded version is I'm a "software developer", with an emphasis on certain portions of my stack(s), but I'm a developer first, who works with users/customers, reads documentation, learns and adapts to APIs, along with best practices, and uses the tools at his hands or, as the case may be, writes a tool to do what I need.
Aside: some people in the C.S. field put a stigma on "web development" like it's a horrible beast we should never discuss, but based on the results from the 2017 StackOverflow Developer Survey (developer type) results, I'd say that 72% of development being for the web is a pretty significant portion.