Said honestly it bothers me that most people think the term hacker in relation to computers means (loosely), "An individual with the intent to harm electronically", such as breaking into someone else’s email account, stealing files, etc.

The term has become so broad that it’s used as an excuse for people’s stupidity.

Example:

"My email account was hacked!"

"Wow, that’s sounds bad. How did it happen?"

"Someone guessed my password!"

That’s not hacking. Not in the slightest. If you were stupid enough to use a weak password, that’s your fault, and the person who "hacked" your account is simply a good guesser.

True hackers to me are programmers, be they beginners or advanced.

If you do something as simple as custom create your own WordPress theme with special PHP functions throughout, you’re technically hacking the code. You saw what WordPress had to offer, didn’t like it and wanted something better. So you sat down, wrote the code by hand, modified some functions, created a few of your own and so on. You hacked the code. There was absolutely nothing illegal about it.

All programmers by default are hackers by nature. They take code, shape it, mold it and do whatever it takes to make it do what they want it to. Maybe one will find some open source code for a program and say, "Y’know, I can make this better." And so it happens. A better program is built from the original source code, more features are added in, ones not needed are taken away, etc.

Just remember that hacker does not necessarily mean "The Bad Guy". And in fact it rarely does. Were it not for code hackers out there we wouldn’t have cool things like, oh, I dunno.. the internet?