Hermit, yeah. I do a lot of collaborative work with testers, but my coding has been mostly alone. I have not been a production programmer for 35 years, and even then I worked almost alone.

I'm not junior in the sense that I have made my living as a consulting software tester for decades. I code usually to prototype things to demonstrate and teach about testing. My clients then pick them up and implement them as they wish.

For true prototyping, code quality is not very important, because my client doesn't want my code-- they want to see a possible solution.

Whenever I AM doing something with other guys, as has happened a lot more since the pandemic started, I try to adopt a more cosmopolitan practice.

I think that is right. But while some people might hear "hermit" and think of a hermetic monk, "mountain man" connotes more wildness. He might fashion his dev tools from the pelts of whatever animal he slaughtered last winter...

It's important to reflect, once in a while, about how BIG the world of software tech is. It's like a galaxy, with whole globular clusters in it that see the world entirely within their own Node.js or Lisp or whatever perspective.

I love HN because it is the one best way I have of tasting the incredible depth and diversity of that world. On the one hand it gives me a feeling that I know very little about software development... but on the other I realize that my own specialty (software testing as social science) is little understood by others. I'm a decent star within my own cluster.

So, maybe everyone who reads HN has a similar experience, no matter where in the galaxy they call home.

(Except that people who work in big teams on popular products are more in the center of the galaxy)