Programming - I'm a coder?

There has obviously been a lot written about programming, and I'm not looking to add anything technical of interest. I can write small programs and pseudocode. I don't think this makes me a coder, but I peruse Ycombinator on an almost daily basis and every once in awhile there will be an article about how many of the people who apply to programmer jobs simply don't know how to code. I look at the coding examples that these companies have posted and note that they are very very simple problems that even I, the barely ever wrote anything "coder," could solve. Yet, I would never consider applying to any of these positions because I know how ill-prepared I would be. Being able to solve the problems almost makes me think that I should be applying for these positions although I'm sure the later rounds would soon show my incompetence.

Perhaps I really should just take the time to do some coding, and then I could apply and be the 1 out of 200 that apply who can code. I lack the determination at this point, but if I can make it through this month of posting, I think I will have leveled up enough to take that on.

Well, wish me luck.

(post 1 seems a bit unorganized, I will get better with more practice)

Credit to: Joel on Software for providing the reading which led to this post.

Goals

I am going to try to write one post a day for the next month to exercise my writing muscle (which is significantly underdeveloped/atrophied. There won't be any specific topic for the month so I will be writing about whatever strikes my fancy.

I almost feel like this exercise will be completely pointless in the way that I feel Twitter is pointless as I'm not sure I have anything interesting to actually say. This will not count as the first post. I will write that in another post.