So, what do you do?

It's a pretty innocent question, probably used to start a thousand conversations or more every hour of the day.

But the world hasn't quite caught up to what I do, really. I picture a giant slide-rule with a bunch of job descriptions on one side and the number of people who understand it all on the other. Answer "Doctor" and most people will get it. Answer "Waitress" and most people will get it. But my job is still coming into common understanding, even as a few others "I'm a Cooper" are falling off.

I'm happy that we seem to be about at the end of the Goofy Job Title era, even as more and more internet companies are born with goofy names. Do you think Gordon Gekko, in some future sequel to Wall Street will be yelling at someone for spending more than $400 a share to buy Google, Yahoo! or Twitter? Several years ago, people at trade shows happily exchanged business cards with titles like "Vice President in charge of Tomorrow" or "Chaos Engineer" or even "Webmaster." What do you do, indeed?

At social gatherings, I usually introduce myself as a "Web Designer" because that term seems to have the most traction with civilians. But, honestly? I haven't designed a Web site in years. I think of someone who actually makes the decision, "The navigation will go here" and "the background colors will be this, this and that" as a Web Designer. You know, making decisions about the design. They aren't concerned too much with storing or retrieving data, assigning values to variables and other bit-twiddling adventures. It's more about the visual construction of the page. I don't really do that.

I have had some acceptance calling myself a "Web Developer" lately. People don't seem to understand that quite as well as Designer, but it does sound a little more thinky, and it is a little closer to what I actually do, on some days. To me, though, a Web Developer is someone who spends their days actively building Web applications. These are the folks who create Web machinery like Blackboard, eBay, or Amazon.com. They aren't so much consumed with the design of a page, as much as whether it correctly gathers names, addresses and other contact information. It doesn't really matter what color the page header is, or what font is used in photo captions, to Web Developers. I don't really do that, either.

For a while, it looked like maybe "Web Master" would come to the fore. I have struggled over the years to gain a level of expertise with several languages, HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP MySQL and now JavaScript. Along the way, I have earned some competence with the Dreamweaver and HomeSite page editors, Photoshop and Fireworks graphic editors, and quite a bit of what passes for operating system and Web server technology. And there are protocols for how we work with all of these tools. Standards compliance, and accessible design being the most prominent. Do you think after all of this I could be a Web Master? Most people seem to smell a little more server technology than I have in my own cologne, so Web Master seems to be receding into the middle distance, somewhere.

We are lucky to share a living language. There is no word for "JavaScript" in Latin. But the downside of that is that if enough people don't get the memo, the entire meaning of a word can change. A century ago, a man could say, "I am gay" and everyone knew he was happy. Today, everyone knows something entirely different. It can happen in only a few years. When Steven Levy wrote Hackers, it was a term of almost reverence. Today, a Hacker is someone with a high degree of evil within them.

Sometimes these changes are important. Sometimes, though, they don't really matter and our language seems to struggle with a concept that does not have a name of its own. Run your PC without antivirus software and you will probably quickly notice a degradation in performance. I don't think it matters much if you want to say you have caught a virus, worm, Trojan, root kit, adware or spyware. A computer technician may disagree. We have all heard the (false) story of how the Eskimo have three-dozen names for "snow." But is it important that my mother or sister know the difference, when you can tell them "I have a virus" and they will fix whatever the problem is? I'm not so sure.

So, "What do you do?"