What Kind of Developer Are You?

My husband wanted to clone me.

Not literally. He's a hobbyist coder with a talent for AI, and was curious whether he could distil my engineering knowledge into skills and agents to code like me. The way I think through problems, the engineering principles I value, the instincts that I've built over 10 years. He asked me to articulate them. And I could.

It made me realise that I had a clear idea of the kind of developer I was, and it was something I'd been building over the years. Earlier in my career I didn't know. I knew how to do the job, but I didn't know how I wanted to do it.

This post is about that gap, and why closing it matters.

Adrift

As a fresh graduate, I did whatever the job called for. Configuring a client's product, styling their website, a data migration script. It was all new and exciting, I was getting good feedback, I felt useful.

Then I was seconded to build something from scratch. A public-facing web front end for museum collections. Lightweight, performant, built in Angular. Nobody else in the business knew Angular, nor did I.

But what followed was one of the most formative experiences of my career, and also one of the loneliest. Every decision was mine. Every problem I hit, I solved without anyone to check my thinking against. And somewhere in the middle of it, I started noticing something. The solutions I was reaching for, the ways I was structuring things... they felt right.

That validation came later, when I encountered those solutions again — in other projects, in other contexts, in a book that gave them names I hadn't known to look for. The realisation wasn't that I'd got it right. It was that I'd been paying attention before I knew it mattered.

That project also showed me the cost of working alone. The product I delivered was good. But I was the only one who understood it. It started to tell me what I actually wanted from the work. Not just to build things. To build things that would survive without me. To leave things better than I found them.

Every time I dipped back into it as new feature requests came in, I recognised the value of clean code. If I couldn't read code I'd written months earlier, how could my colleagues? If I couldn't remember the architecture decisions I'd made, how could I change things with confidence?

And what was I leaving my colleagues? I was building something they would need to maintain, a new product they needed to be able to customise, in a language none of them knew. I didn't want them to have to go through all the same painful lessons I did. I wanted them to be able to use it without needing me in the room to explain it.

Every decision on that project was driven by people. My colleagues. The archivists. Members of the public. Respect for their time, their ability, their security. I was starting to see what sort of developer I wanted to become.

What's the point?

So what's the point of knowing this about yourself?

Part of it is direction. Software engineering covers so many different kinds of roles that the sooner you know which way you want to go, the better. It means you know what you want from your current role, what you're looking for in the next one, and when it's time to make that move.

The other part is recognising fit. Rather than chasing the tech stack or the salary, you can look for the places that will let you do the kind of work you actually want to do. You ask different questions in interviews. Instead of trying to convince someone to hire you, you're finding out whether they can take you where you want to go.

It doesn't mean you'll always get it right. A role can sound ideal on paper and still not fit in practice. Or you find yourself heading in a different direction than the one you started on. But knowing something isn't right means you can do something about it.

Do you know who you are?

If you're reading this and you don't have a clean answer — that's fine. I didn't either, I wasn't even asking the question.

You don't find it by sitting down and deciding. You find it by paying attention to what you keep coming back to. The parts of the job that don't feel like work. The decisions you make that feel right. The things you care about that nobody put on the ticket.

You're not choosing values off a list. You're noticing the ones that are already there.

What do you keep coming back to, even when nobody's asking you to? Share it in the comments. Someone still figuring out their own answer might recognise themselves in yours.