I find more and more these days that the description "infrastructure programmer" seems to be more and more applicable to the type of work I do. My current employer owns an ever-expanding number of discussion boards (like http://www.fordforums.com and www.tunerfriends.com). So, we buy them from people and have to move them over from their current locations to our servers. 99% of the sites are running on vBulletin, a commerical PHP-based product.

But sometimes the sites aren't running vBulletin, so I end up having to use the import tools that vBulletin provides (covering a surprisingly large number of forum software packages). They do a pretty good job but I invariably end up having to write some custom tool to migrate the non-standard part of the site. In this case I had to migrate the users's vehicle information (pictures and descriptions) from one site to the other.

While working on this tool (making it generic enough to work on the other two sites I need to migrate as well) I realized that I'd been doing infrastructure work all the time and not very much user interface work. Which is just as well because my CSS and make-things-look-pretty skills need a lot of work. I am trying but it's gonna be a tough go.

/me hikes up his pants to hide the PHP Plumber butt