How to Be a Creatively Versatile Programmer

Programming requires extraordinary mathematical and analytical skills, combined with logical reasoning.

However, a vast majority of wannabe programmers convert that to some inherent nerdy-ness and obliviousness to the all things that are beautiful.

They refuse to expand their range beyond number-play and efficient loops.

That lack of versatility haunts them later in their careers.

What Programmers at Large Really Think of Creativity:

Most programmers are of the opinion that algorithmic prowess is superior to creativity. Interview processes in flagship companies simply reinforce their belief. Interview prep factories (aka mental gyms) including competitive programming sites thrive in such an atmosphere.

Developers, Stop That Stressful Interview Preparation

Instead, be prepared with real software skills. Your dream tech employer will lay you off sooner than you might think

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Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are more focused towards finding problems in people’s lives and setting up SAAS stacks to make quick money. As a result, beauty and versatility is lost.

Does Creativity Really Have a Place Beyond UX / UI?

In popular programming world, Creativity is mostly reserved for UX designers.

In hindsight, most (male) programmer think of creativity as some feminine trait. It is a stereotype so deeply etched into coders’ collective psyche that it is even hard to notice.

On the contrary, creativity has manifested itself in programming since its inception.

It exists in creation of higher level (human understandable) languages. It exists in intensely powerful graphical design tools.

It exists in billion dollar animation industry, only a fragment of which animators+ gamers work upon. They simply use the Game Engine libraries and tweak some values, without understanding the beauty of how human-lovable animations are given as built-ins into Animation softwares.

It exists in the way Promises empower callbacks, circumventing gargantuan meshes of nested brackets.

It exists in the way Hash was invented:

Limited definition of creativity can get many coders lucrative job in FAAMG. But it renders them useless to a million things that programming as a discipline has to offer.

So here goes two ways to foster programming versatileness.

Read Engineering Blogs:

Engineering blog was limited to huge software houses couple of decades ago. Nowadays it’s a common practice. And it has done a great thing: encouraging friendly, healthy competition between competent software teams.

Part of it is also fueled by open source culture. But it is enormously valuable nonetheless.

Engineering blogs not only gives you insight about great architectural approaches that you could clone. It also gives you resources that you can consume. For example, Youtube recently published dataset of user generated content. A programmer wanting to build a marketing app could benefit from it directly.

Following engineering blogs of 10 leading companies every weekend can flex your creativity muscle beyond your imagination. You will be amazed how much informative opinions you could hold in your next interviews.

Blogs of AirBNB, Facebook, Slack and Google are quite eagerly followed by elite coders.

Microsoft and Google have engineering blogs that are dedicated to every product, such as cloud, Youtube and AI.

Following them not only imparts you practical programming tips, but also a unique edge in interviews with those companies, and others alike.

Follow Curated Resources Repos:

List of great things accomplished using Technology X.

This Javascript Repo has 18K+ stars. It has everything great in Javascript under single umbrella.

Here is a similar repo for React Native, boasting 25K+ stars as of this writing.

iOS has some 2000+ awesome repos, listed under here.

They give you just enough awesomeness that you need for your next indie project.

You can do it, without even revealing the source. You can build some valuable connections though, if you decide to credit and cross link with them. (Our product proudly uses X)

Conclusion:

Being algorithmically powerful requires great math genes. Plus practice. Creative versatility requires a choice.

Do you want to expand your range?

Originally published on Medium: