I'm a developer to the core, and I've been coding since the late 70s. But I also read a lot, and I've always fancied being a writer and cranking out some middlebrow tech flavoured stuff like Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams. So I've also read a lot of "how to be a writer" stuff. One comment from an established author stuck with me. When asked "how do you know you're a writer?", the reply was "because you can't not write". When I read that I realised I'm a coder at heart, because I can't not code. The ideas that come to me are software ideas, and they find their expression as code. It's an itch that needs to be scratched. It all comes down to how badly you need to scratch the itch. And I know that if I don't scratch it I'll go mad.

Interesting. I guess I'm not a "true coder" by that definition. I'm probably more of a pragmatist than I'd like to admit. I like the results of coding but not for its own sake. If someone has written a hashtable implementation I'll thank them but won't roll my own.

Took me a while to realise this. I kept kicking myself thinking I "should" be more interested in crypto, functional programming etc.

I think I don't like software quite that much, but enough to where if I did have spare mental energy, I probably would use it. That's an interesting perspective though, and one I see in many Type A coders. I just don't have it in me I don't think.