What profession would you say is most like software development? I'd love to be able to give people an idea of what I do, without making it sound like witchcraft...

construction work in general, I feel like I could apply agile as an architect to the builders

@funvengeance so you build something knowing that it will crash and be rebuilt many times before it can be delivered to customers.

book writer but instead of writing book you rewrite single chapter multiple times

@vane I don't think refactoring your book is that uncommon. And bugs cause undefined behaviour when your text is interpreted and run on your readers.

@electrineer yeah, also I feel I got very much in common with renaissance culture, programming is somehow poetry, classes/functions are rhymes, syntax are words, computer is paper, keyboard is pen, compiler/interpreter is ink.

Mathematician is probably the closest in terms of complexity. (Nothing even comes close to the complexity of Webpacked ES6 Angular projects running on Electron, though!)

Or roboticist? We write text files that control robots, too, though our robots are quite stationary, and significantly smarter.

Or you could call us little Gods creating life. Our infrastructure (servers, databases, services, VM providers, failovers, routers, ...) are the cells/organs/circulatory systems, our code is the DNA they run, etc. We intentionally design and build each of these pieces so they all intercommunicate and work together to form a single functioning creature.

And we're up to large communities of multicellular organisms presently. Pretty soon we'll be creating the technological equivalent of amoebas and jellyfish! (And don't ever let anyone tell you that isn't impressive.)

@Root except amoeba got largest codebase (DNA) on earth 😅

@vane That's the direction were heading, too. lol.
Linux Kernel, Chrome, Windows, ...

Chef, most the time you're just copying other peoples work, but you occasionally have to be creative and make something up yourself

drill instructor, but instead of soldiers, you tell computers what to do