5 years ago I went abroad for 10 months, equipped only with a backpack and whatever I could carry in it. Looking back, I overestimated what I’d need (like, really what essentials I could survive on) and ended up tossing stuff as I went. I started in South-East India, in a town called Auroville, spent some time traveling through south-central India, and then found my way to SE Asia, moving my way up and down the Peninsula from Singapore to Bangkok. It was a remarkable time, where I learned a lot about myself and what I’m capable of on my own (in good ways and bad).
I met a lot of people on that trip and have stayed friends with some of them since. One pair of adventurers I befriended introduced me to the culture of Digital Nomadism. While not a programmer on his own, Guy was building a startup and would work regularly at co-working spaces in whatever country he was currently staying in. I met so many entrepreneurs and programmers while hanging out with Guy and was struck by this reality where they’d build their companies or do their work remotely in amazing locations.
The benefit of a digital nomad's lifestyle is that if you choose your country wisely, you don’t have to spend much on housing or food, you still make good money working remotely, and you get to enjoy experiencing new cultures and places.
I would meet programmers who decided to do this and kept on leaving those interactions thinking: “God what I’d give to do that”. My limiting factor was that I was not a programmer, but hanging out with these folks got me thinking that all I needed was self-discipline to get me to the level where I could break out of my teaching career and into web and app development.
That was 2013-14. Since then, I’ve been spending my free time learning to program, and in doing so, I’ve rediscovered my love of problem-solving, something that I remember especially taking classes like geometry in high school, but which over the years, I wasn’t nurturing. I have a background in a different type of problem solving: ART. Art demands that you develop your own rules and structures, that you find novel ways to revisit old problems, and that you look for inspiration in even the most mundane things. As someone who solved problems of Art, I found myself drawn to systems of logic and ways in which I could temper the creative urge with self-imposed limitations. Art is about seeking and practicing balance for me.
When I started to really dive into programming, I saw its problem-solving process as both different and similar to the way I practiced creating Art. In both you start with nothing. In art, I could choose a path -- at the beginning I might decide: “This is going to be a portrait”, or I might say - I am going to make no conscious decisions about what this will be. In programming, it doesn’t really make sense to program without having an end goal in mind. It’s kind of required. Before you create your first object, you need to know what it’s there for. Every piece of your code has a purpose and is contributing in its own purposeful way to the whole. The ethos of programming is essentialism. Useless code has no place in a program because the program’s purpose is to function. In Art there is an ethos of dualism, where every mark is an artifact of the journey to completing the work, and has a place in the completed work. Even mistakes are honored in Art. This is partly because art, as much as it’s about the object, is also about the artist or the mechanism by which the art was arrived at.
That last difference is the major difference between the two. Art and Programming both put value on the final product, but in Art, the process, the intention, the feeling, and the artist herself are woven into the way we experience and value it. Those aspects of problem-solving, as much as they are present in the problem-solving process when it comes to programming, are not at the forefront of how we evaluate the outcome of problem-solving in programming. Simply, we ask: “does it work”?
I’m sure I’ve oversimplified things, but my point is to highlight that there are similarities and differences in Art and programming, and that for me they both satisfy urges I have to express myself. In Art that expression is raw and more about exploring what lies within. In programming that expression is calculated and more about exploring how we relate to the world around us. They both force the mind to think in novel ways.
In a few weeks time, I’m going to start my first full-time job as a programmer, building products with a team. Not only am I excited to be surrounded by other people with similar interests and experiences I can learn from, but I’m also eager to be more saturated in an environment where we’re constantly using code and computation to solve problems.
vaporwave
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
