Software Engineering is My Creative Outlet

I’ve never considered myself a “creative”. I’ve gone as far as to identify as the opposite. I don’t really know what the word for that is but I always said I was a “computer guy” and the tangible “arts” just weren’t for me. I knew since the 6th grade that my career was going to involve something with computers. There was just a way that my mind connected with computer interfaces that felt so much more natural than anything else in the world. Everything else I tried just felt… Unintuitive.

I say this to the degree that I took my high school’s “Art 101” as an elective and was so overwhelmed with my lack of ability to visualize or ideate what I should be doing that this would end up becoming my first class I had ever dropped after being tasked to “draw anything you would like”. I tried branching out to metal working and wood working and while they were doable they always felt much harder than anything I’d ever done involving technology. I think that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to my homelabbing endeavors and trying to make the most irresponsible and crazy ideas I can imagine come to life.

As an adult I’ve managed to force myself out of my comfort zone and to grow into other areas that were completely unapproachable to me before. A few years ago I became a first time homeowner and found myself thrown into the deep end of becoming a DIYer as someone who’s too cheap to pay someone else to do work I can do myself (with the advice and guidance of my father who is a skilled tradesman).

Taking on this new stage of my life where I’m forced to be more creative and come up with solutions I can fabriacte to solve problems in my home I’ve started to reflect more on what the creative mind really entails and why it felt so alien to me my whole life. The more I worked with my hands and became comfortable with simple woodworking and electrical the more I started to gain a new appreciation for my profession as a creative profession rather than a purely “engineering” or “mathematical” practice.

When people think of software engineering they tend to have this idea that it’s always a predictable and deterministic or mathematical endeavor. While this is certainly true for some I’ve never really worked with code in this way. I’ve never been much of a LeetCoder or someone who memorized the most efficient algorithms and patterns.

I don’t think of my code bases as inputs and outputs. Instead they take their own undescribable “shape” in my head where I think about the logic flow as a contour or rounded edge that you can trace your finger over and feel the groove of where you’re headed. I imagine the little pieces of technical debt left behind as little pimples or gouges in the “material” that can be filled, chiseled, or sanded away with patience.

I think of it how I imagine a whittler who has a piece cut down to 70% or so of the final shape thinks of their creation. You can tell just by looking at it what you’re going for but you can still see the coarse cuts at the base that haven’t received enough attention to have a decipherable shape yet. Or around the top where the artist has really spent the most time and you can see exactly what their vision is and the idea is conveyed to you in completeness.

I may have a really solid piece of logic in one place but I know somewhere else that feeds into this good piece of logic I have the coarse cut “legs” that hasn’t quite taken their final shape yet. When I get around to refactoring it or doing whatever is needed to make it “nice” I get that hit of dopamine that same way you would when you finish a painting and set your brush down and can soak in the conclusion of your vision becoming physical and tangible.

For me code has always been the material I’m most comfortable working with. I can imagine what my “brush strokes” in my text editor will do and how it will change the overall shape of the project. When I think about how I’m going to solve a problem I can see the “vision” of where I’m trying to get. I don’t know exactly what “paints” I’ll have to mix or how I’ll have to apply them to get to that final destination but I have the vision in my head of what it should feel like. Everything beyond that is the patient chiseling of material. Knocking off huge slabs here, sanding tiny layers off over there, and lots of staring at it and wondering how I am possibly going to get to where I’m trying to go.

I still can’t draw or express myself in “visually pleasing” ways to this day. I would say it’s actually ironic that so much of how I try to express my relationship with code is through this visual model because I actaully can’t see anything in my mind’s eye. This is called “aphantasia” and means I can’t voluntarily visualized mental images. But when I think of code it’s like I, for a lack of a better word, “feel” the shape of it inside me.

When I get something working just the way I want it to, exactly how I imagined, its the same feeling as when you make something out of wood and design it to fit in a space and when you finish it you watch the piece slide into place perfectly. It comes with a sense of relief where your shoulders feel just a little lighter now that you can enjoy the final product and that although you maybe didn’t know how it would come out in the end you now know it came out right. I know every time I right a new piece of code and finally get it completed I can’t help but run it a dozen times watching the same inputs turn into the same outputs in the same amount of time while grinning like a child who just got python to say “Hello $YOUR_NAME!” for the first time.

I know this may seem like I’ve been leading you down a pointless train of thought through this entire post. And I’d have to agree and say that you’re right. I don’t think I really have a real point or conclusion I’m drawing you towards per se. To me this is an attempt to express an idea I feel deeply attached to that I find hard to connect others with.

The “point” if I had to come up with one would be that some software engineers consider themselves to be strictly mathematical in their work but I propose that there are parallels to be drawn between the art and software engineering. The process of taking your rough material and molding it into something that was previously only an idea in your head. It’s almost romantic in it’s own quirky way. I’m not the first person to have this revelation by a long shot but this was my attempt to convey and share what that sentiment means to me personally.