Somewhere in an old issue of Monkey Business, a journal of Japanese fiction, an editor was introduced as

Motoyuki Shibata, one of Japan’s most highly regarded men of letters.

Something about the description stuck with me ever since. I imagine that, at a dinner party, if Mr. Shibata was asked what he did, he would still probably describe himself as an editor and translator.

Being described as a highly regarded man of letters, works only to the extent that people already have a rough idea of what you do. But for those already in the know, the self-wrought description goes beyond standard a job title to convey human things like aspirations, personality and preferences — the things that make us interesting.

These days, I enjoy jumping between design and code to solve problems. So what does that officially make me? A product designer, UX designer, information architect, mobile designer, web developer, back-end dev, art director? At some point in time, the work I’ve done could’ve been defined by all these roles, but I couldn’t care less.

What I really hope is that one day I get introduced as something like

a world-renown maker of joyful software.