On Code & Creativity

Peo­ple are gen­er­ally sur­prised to hear that first part of my post-secondary edu­ca­tion was focused on soft­ware. Sure, these days I’m more into the front-end UI than the back-end DB, but my heart is in language.

When folks think of soft­ware devel­op­ers, they think of a per­son that fits into one of these categories:

• Dude
• Dil­bert
• Reclu­sive nerd with lit­tle to no sense of social skills
• Left-brainer with lit­tle to no sense of creativity
• All of the above

Stereo­types exist for a rea­son.

“…in order to be able to inter­act effec­tively, we must have some idea of what peo­ple are likely to be like, which behav­iors will be con­sid­ered accept­able, and which not.”

Heidi Burgess

Alright, I con­cede. Some­times, I fall into the stereo­type of the drool­ing nerd who does noth­ing but play video games for eight hours a day instead of get­ting my work done. It’s also fair to say that lots of soft­ware devs lack the social skills to be in sales or mar­ket­ing. I can even admit that Dil­ber­tisms exist for an equally impor­tant rea­son: all devs have had the dreaded PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) dur­ing their time in Cubi­cle Nation.

It’s the assump­tion – I’m a some­times code mon­key and that means that I can’t pos­si­bly be cre­ative – that makes my nasty eye twitch come back.

Code Cre­ates Things. Beau­ti­ful Things.

Look at your favourite piece of soft­ware. I’ve got mine run­ning in the back­ground while I write. Look at the way it’s laid out, the colours, how your eye moves across it, and even the mood it puts you in. UI experts put their souls into that. Design­ers lent their cre­ative ener­gies. But it was the devel­op­ers that put all the pieces together.

It was the devel­op­ers that flexed their fin­gers and made it all pos­si­ble. The devs were the creators.

The best exam­ple of beau­ti­ful things cre­ated by code is: web­sites and web appli­ca­tions. Lus­cious lay­outs with exquis­ite typog­ra­phy that ooze cre­ative juices. Don’t they make you want to crawl inside? Yeah, those are the prod­uct of a fel­low code mon­key tak­ing the juicy Pho­to­shop design and mak­ing it a real­ity for the web.

When I worked as an in-house soft­ware devel­oper from 2006 to 2008, I was also the UI spe­cial­ist. I took Excel spread­sheet mock­ups and made it scal­able for both a hand­held com­puter and a reg­u­lar desk­top in Pho­to­shop and then imple­ment the pro­to­type in Visual Stu­dio.

My job was to take the ini­tial con­cepts and make them a real­ity; to cre­ate a prod­uct from scratch.

And yet, when I talked about my job to my friends, they would just chalk it up to another of my nerdy endeav­ours and ignore it. Soft­ware devel­op­ment didn’t affect them. Real soft­ware devs were science-fiction. After all, I didn’t work at Microsoft or IBM or Bioware. I worked for a 3PL ware­hous­ing com­pany. I wasn’t cre­ative; I was doing what I was told under my cor­po­rate leash.

Every project that I’ve worked on – both in-house and as an inde­pen­dent contractor/freelancer – has involved the com­bi­na­tion of my right & left. My 1’s & 0’s. Work­ing together. In tandem.

Code + Cre­ativ­ity = One Rockin’ Product

That’s what vio­let­minded is all about: using both sides of the equa­tion to bal­ance the needs of  project by expos­ing the cre­ativ­ity in code and div­ing into the logic of cre­ative projects. When it comes to cre­at­ing any kind of soft­ware solu­tion – be it web-based or not — you can’t have one with­out the other, even if it looks as sim­ple as words on a web­site or a text-based editor.

You need the cre­ative chutz­pah to gen­er­ate the ideas and the tech­ni­cal skills to make the magic.

So the next time you hear some­one knock­ing a soft­ware dev’s cre­ative skills, tell ‘em this: you can’t have the code (or the solu­tion) with­out the cre­ativ­ity.

Tagged as: code, creativity, geekery