Professional, amateur, and something else

I opened a blog posts a while back by saying

One of the differences between amateur and professional software development is whether you're writing software for yourself or for someone else. It's like the difference between keeping a journal and being a journalist.

This morning I saw where someone pulled that quote and I thought about how I'm now somewhere that doesn't fall into either category. I'm a professional, and a software developer, but not a professional software developer.

People pay me for work that may require writing software, but they usually don't want my software per se. They want reports that may require me to write software to generate. My code is directly for my own use but indirectly for someone else. Occasionally I will have a client ask me for software, but not often.

In the last few years I've been asked to read software more often than I've been asked to write it. For example, I was an expert witness on an intellectual property case and had to read a lot of source code. But even that project fit into the pattern above: I wrote some code to help me do my review, but my client didn't care about that code per se, only what I found with it.

• Software exoskeletons
• Professional volunteers