what is a “Coder” and what kind of work do you do?

A “Coder,” or the informal “Code Monkey” is a computer programmer.

My official title is Lead Application Developer. Almost everything I do is for the web (i.e. web sites and web applications), but I have created a few desktop applications thanks to Adobe AIR.

I work in a few different scripting/programming languages. For the most part, I work in ActionScript 3 (AS3), the language that drives Flash. My company does a lot of interactive e-learning projects and Flash just seems to be the best way to produce them.

I also work in a couple of server-side scripting languages: ColdFusion and PHP. A lot of people laugh at me when I tell them that I work in ColdFusion because it’s not really popular any more (hey, MySpace runs on ColdFusion… oh wait), but I have to explain to them that I kind of fell into it. The first job I had while still in college was at a Flash/ColdFusion shop so that’s what I learned and that’s what stuck.

When I found out that ColdFusion is also prohibitively expensive, I taught myself some PHP as a backup. This is the language I use if I do free-lance work and I’ve only very recently had to bust it out at work because we were developing something for a client who wanted to host the project in-house and didn’t want to shell out the big bucks for ColdFusion.

If you’re looking into becoming a “coder,” I highly recommend it. Sometimes it’s stressful because, c’mon, who hasn’t had a “WHY WON’T THIS COMPUTER DO WHAT I’M TELLING IT TO DO?!” moment? But the rest of the time, you get to watch something you wrote come to life on screen.

Ask me anything