How can programmers be creative?

Hi,

How can a code geek with no artistic flair be made a Creative Programmer? (Thinking of myself here   )

Thanks,

Fintan

Hi Fintan,

That's kind of a vague question, I'd be inclined to say the first part of the answer is being motivated to be more creative! Without intent and interest, nothing much will follow. In my book, I've divided the "how to be creative" question into seven main themes (chapters 2 and onwards). Feel free to take a look and perhaps afterwards rephrase your question to something more specific ;-)

I'm going to cite this article again because I think it's relevant to the question: https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2023/06/13/where-do-insights-come-from/

The article lists three main sources of insight—and as I said in another thread, insight and creativity are closely related:

1. Creative desperation - where you realize that there's a belief or assumption that's limiting your thinking and you decide to discard that belief or assumption.

2. Connections - where you see patterns and relationships and figure out how things fit together.

3. Contradictions - where you see a pattern that doesn't quite fit together.

All these resonate with my experience as a programmer and I could cite many instances where I had to be creative because of these things. For me, refactoring gives me many opportunities to get creative. Also, design is a very creative activity. If you're a programmer, you should always be experimenting, designing, and refactoring. In other words, if you're a programmer, how can you NOT be doing anything creative? Pretty much everything we do as programmers is creative.