Of course you can be an amateur programmer, amateur means you're practicing something but not in a professional manner (i.e. unpaid). A huge number of the peop

Of course you can be an amateur programmer, amateur means you're practicing something but not in a professional manner (i.e. unpaid). A huge number of the people who program things like their raspberry pi or open source projects are amateur programmers. Or all the students and dabblers. Same goes for engineering in general, if you spend any amount of time in a rural area you'll stumble on some amateur engineering genius.