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I'm a 35 year veteran programmer, so I might not remember clearly, but I totally disagree with this. You will NEVER cover all the core areas of CS, there are too many. So, most developers specialize, somewhere. You can get pretty good at some core thing in 6 months and I give you permission to call yourself a programmer as soon as you have successfully built, and regularly use, something you wanted for yourself.

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You are one of the few senior engineering leaders who think like this! And kudos to you! Wish I had talked to you in the earlier days of me struggling to learn

I support this kind of encouragement.

Please, if you've built something that you or someone else has used, you're a programmer/developer.

This field is so broad that I also feel like I don't know what I'm doing with 10+ years of experience. You will never learn/know everything and that's OK.

OK, so if I wrote a UI that a call center used to more easily allow staff to access different customer categories, and I also wrote a text analysis script to analyze and categorize customer feedback, I'm officially a programmer/developer?

Sounds like it to me!

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