Engineer or developer is pretty accurate if you want to be nonspecific. Most of us have roles at any given time, as well as more long-term specializations, just

Engineer or developer is pretty accurate if you want to be nonspecific. Most of us have roles at any given time, as well as more long-term specializations, just like you don't have generic PhDs, scientists, etc, and it's usually better to identify those traits, than say something generic. "Coding" irks me as well. Probably because it's used uniquely by outsiders, in my experience. I tried to ponder more about why the word might be inappropriate for what we do, but didn't get anywhere. There's that obvious difference with the word "to program", that "to program" identifies what we do, but "coding" identifies what we use. Another aspect, is that "code" is probably a leftover from the paper card programming days, where source code was very cryptic. Now we use programming languages, which are readable, so suddenly the meaning "something cryptic" of the word "code" isn't appropriate anymore. Of course, you could say that coding refers to the fact that all programming is conversion of intent into some form of messages, like processor instructions or ones and zeroes. In that sense a synonym for coder could be intent digitizer. A bit more sci-fi.