The Joy of Creation

In the technology business, or the business of leveraging technology, it is easy to get into “farming” mode and foget about creating things.

This is a danger - because it seperates you from reality. How hard are things to do? How easy are things to do? How differently could we do things?

These questions can be answered via experimentation, investigation and trial-and-error. Basically “Getting on the tools” !

If you are not getting to the coal-face on at least a semi-regular basis, you are missing out. Missing out on finding new things, uncovering new possibilities and stimulating the element of “what if” in your mind…

You are missing out on the joy of creation. That spark you feel when you translate an idea into reality - when the experience of your past combines with the potential of the present to create the future.

Basically you are part of a business help make new things. Be they services or products. To do this you need to either invent new “stuff” or put existing “stuff” together in new ways.

Often I see programmers in paticular say they are a “Ruby Dev” or “Java Dev” or “Haskell Dev” (for the cool kids). This is an unhelpful perspective. You are a developer - you understand the fundamentals of the development of software, irrespective of the language being used.

Being a “polyglot”-style developer opens up a vista of new opportunities in terms of what you can build, how fast you can build it, and how useful it is to your customers.

We are blessed with a range of frameworks and languages today that can render some of the most troublesome problems of the past into just a few short lines of code. You can get from idea - to concept - to reality in just hours; given the correct selection of components to get the job done.

Why spend days writing thousands of lines of code? When, with the right framework, you can achieve the same outcome with 5 lines of code.

Recently I did a project to bring an idea to life - I had components written in JavaScript, Node.js, Java, Ruby and bash shell script to make it all work. It was all maintanable, sharable, componentised, scalable and got the job done with an economy of effort that was, dare I say it, elegant.

Open your mind. Use a new technology. Try a different language. Play with a new framework.

Rediscover the joy of creation!