Oh dear, I'm so sorry for my misunderstanding. I do feel that when you say "badass" as an adjective, you mean you're really good at something, but like in an unconventional way. Like you don't play by the rules and such, and no one tells you what to do, because you're so much more competent and you never get challenged doing things your way. I don't know, just something about calling yourself a "badass programmer" really seems to me like you're just oozing confidence, I'm really sorry if I'm not explaining well.
That's actually not so far from the image I was trying to convey, but I never associated confidence with it, because I'm usually stressed. It's an exaggeration, but one example of my work ethic is pulling an all nighter unexpectedly, without any requests from anyone or any project being on the books, I started working at 9pm and by 9am had a new system built and data ported from the old one. Emailed everyone who needed to know, plus my boss, said I was going to sleep, and if there's any problems give me a call and I will wake up and fix whatever blew up. This was like a wednesday or something, and my first time doing something like that extreme, so it was unusual. But nothing blew up and nobody complained and I got kudos for making everyone's life easier. Including my own. This new system basically saved me 2-3 days of work every 3 months and lowered it to 15 minutes every 3 months. This was my main motivation. "F it we're doing it live".
Mind you the average day is completely different than that and a lot more average. But I do have a reputation for an unorthodox working style and that's what I wanted to sort of express with "badass", without really saying all too much. So the picture painted was not spot on, but that's what you get when you skimp out on vocabulary
Sometimes I feel confident about my work and usually I don't. My brain is constantly questioning every single possible angle, which IMO makes me a good programmer. But as a result I am usually never satisfied. At work I maintain over 20 systems and am building new ones at the same time, so that's a lot of mental overhead for me. Uncertainty is unavoidable, and uncertainty leads to stress, which chips away at confidence. And I am confident in my abilities, but I can only do one thing at a time.
What kind of programming do you do? I mostly work with SAS and SQL, but all I do is create tables and organize data, and I'm certainly not at all badass, lol
At work I mainly use ColdFusion for server-side processing and Javascript and various libraries for front-end stuff. HTML and CSS don't count as programming but I do a lot of that too, as we don't have a front-end or graphics person. We have a virtual database server up that runs MSSQL. I'm the guy who designs and builds all the database tables, and builds tools/applications/surveys/portals/etc. for people to use online. Another aspect of my job is interfacing most of these applications with an Oracle database that I have limited access to.
I used SAS very very briefly during an internship, but basically I was mainly dealing with the data, so I basically know what it is and what it's for, but have not used it longer than 3-4 days.
I just call myselff a badass programmer because everyone else in the office works 9-4 hours and does administrative stuff. They open spreadsheets, update student records in online databases, respond to queries, and pick up their telephones. And other stuff like that. Meanwhile I'm locked away in my office across the hall doing who the hell knows what.
![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
