(A Realistic Assessment): Every so often someone asks me or for advice on how to be a computer programmer. This question has always caused me a bit of anxiety because it brings up all sorts of other thoughts like, ‘the semantic and social differences in the definitions between a coder, a programmer and an engineer’, or ‘what is the context of the word “how” in this question?’. It’s a simple question with an extremely complex and subjective set of answers.