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There’s this stereotype that programming isn’t a creative field, that programmers do nothing but mechanically assemble code all day. I find that really sad, I think if we did a better job of explaining how creative programming actually is many more people would be willing to give it a shot.

If you’ve only ever had a total beginner intro to programming, it might be really hard to see where the creativity comes in. Honestly, variables are pretty boring and conditionals aren’t much better. Programming gets a lot more interesting once you’ve mastered the basics, I swear :)

Programming is a bit like building things with lego blocks, except that you have to make all the blocks yourself. Building the blocks – that is, writing an if statement or creating a variable – isn’t that interesting, I’ll be honest. But once you get good at creating those blocks, that’s when you get to be creative. Just like you can build a castle or a siege engine or an entire lego Westeros out of simple little blocks, you can build amazing things out of variables and loops and conditionals if you’re patient.

It’s also a bit like pottery or wood working. Just because you’re constrained to making a usable cup or chair doesn’t mean you can’t be incredibly creative within those constraints. Even in visual art or writing you need sentences that make sense and a combination of shapes and colours that work. Jokes about modern art aside, you can’t just throw paint in the direction of the canvas and expect anyone to care what you’ve done.

There are always constraints on anything you make, programming just has particularly rigid ones. An imperfect sentence is still intelligible, but a missing semicolon will keep your code from compiling at all. For some people that’s more frustration than they care to deal with, for others it’s an interesting challenge.

Building your own project that does anything you want it to is pretty obviously creative, but what about programming at work where you’re given assignments?

Even the least interesting internal application still requires creative problem solving to add new features or fix bugs. There have been times when I’ve had to be very creative to change an application in a way that meets the new requirements without breaking anything that used to work and without making a horrifying mess of the code. There are often quick and dirty ways to make a change that just leave you with more trouble in the long run, and sometimes (in an emergency, for example) they’re the least bad option, but usually you think about not just how you can make the change that’s necessary right now but how you can set things up so that you can make more changes in the future without tearing your hair out.

There’s never just one way to do that, either. When you’re working through a beginner tutorial it will probably look like there’s one right way to build any application and you can’t be creative at all once you’ve decided what you’re going to build and what the user interface should look like. That’s totally untrue. Once you’re working on anything larger than a simple assignment to write a for loop, you enter the world of trade-offs. There’s never only one way to solve a problem and each solution has its own pros and cons.

For example, optimizing code so it runs faster involves a lot of decisions about trade-offs and a lot of creative problem solving. Optimizing code usually makes it harder to read, which makes it harder to update if you need a new feature or find a bug. This matters a whole lot when you’re running a business because programmer time is so expensive. On the other hand, if your program runs so slowly that no one wants to use it (and pay for it!), it doesn’t matter how nice the code is to work with. Sometimes you absolutely need your code to run as fast as possible and unclear code is worth it to get your game to run at a decent frame rate. Other times performance isn’t your highest priority and what you really need is to be able to read and change your code quickly because you get requests for new features all the time.

In short, I build things all day. How is that not creative?

Professional programming and the kind of programming you learn in college/university/bootcamp/etc are actually very different things. Despite what you learned in school, development is really maintenance. In other words, I’m here to crush your dreams :)

So, you know how in school you started new projects from the ground up all the time? Yeah, you’ll hardly ever do that at work.

Now, sometimes you will need to research new technologies and/or frameworks and starting a new prototype project is usually a part of that, and sometimes even the largest and slowest moving organization needs to start something completely new, but that’s generally a very small part of the job.

What you’ll actually spend most of your time doing as a professional developer is adding features and fixing bugs in an existing product. That’s such a large part of the job that I wish we’d done more (or any) of it in school. For anyone reading this who is learning to code, I strongly recommend taking sample projects or open source projects or whatever you can get your hands on and adding new features or fixing bugs. Learning to read other people’s code is hugely important and you may only barely touch on it in your studies.

To be fair, just learning to code takes a lot of time and you can only cram so much into any one program without keeping students there for years and years, but I wish we put a little more emphasis on what software developers actually do at work most of the time. I also wish we’d spent more time on why design is such a big deal.

One of the consequences of hardly ever starting completely new projects at work is that the few projects that do get started are extremely long lived. Instead of a tiny throw-away project that you spend maybe a week building and then never touch again, you’ll work with applications that live for years or even decades. This can be really weird to adjust to since the lifespan of those projects means every tiny decision you made in five minutes can come back to haunt you for years to come :)

On the other hand, long lived projects have a much greater impact than tiny little throw-aways. If you do a good job, the code you write can make people’s lives a little bit easier for years and years. You can also build much larger things, whether they’re applications, games, frameworks, or something else entirely, when you have years to work on something. Corporate software development isn’t all bad, you get to work on things that you could never build on your own.

Another way professional development is different from school projects is that requirements always, always change. Even if every feature you add is perfect and bug free (ha!), your users are going to ask for new things and/or discover that the feature they asked for isn’t actually what they needed and the business might expand into new areas and the laws that your business has to follow might change. Sometimes technical requirements even drive changes: if a new version of your database or framework or a library you depend on comes out, eventually you’re going to want to switch to that.

The requirements changes can be infuriating, I’m not going to sugar-coat that. But at least you get to work on something that people care enough about to ask for changes, even if sometimes it seems like they have no idea what they actually want. If you never had to change a piece of software, all that would mean was that absolutely nobody was using it. I  don’t know about you but I think it’s pretty cool that people actually use the stuff I build.

Real world software development is very, very different from what you do in school, so don’t be surprised if it takes you a little while to find your feet. As much as it can be frustrating sometimes, there are some really cool upsides too.

One of the things I struggled with when I was new to programming was how to tell whether a given piece of code is good or not. When everything is new and confusing, how do you tell bad confusing from normal confusing?

One thing that will give you a very helpful hint is if you code is hard to explain. Like this Python style guide puts it:

If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea. This is a general software engineering principle — but applies very well to Python code. Most Python functions and objects can have an easy-to-explain implementation. If it’s hard to explain, it’s probably a bad idea. Usually you can make a hard-to-explain function easier-to-explain via “divide and conquer” — split it into several functions.

Basically, if something you’re working on is hard to explain, that’s a sign that it needs to be re-thought. Some problems are just unavoidably complex, but it should still be possible to explain what you’re doing at a high level.

That applies to higher level application logic just as much as to individual functions. At a previous job I worked on a multiplayer game project that involved putting groups of players into rooms together for each round, then closing down that room when the round was over and creating a new one. Our first implementation seemed like a good idea at the time, but when we got the game to a point where the team could play together, we had a terrible time explaining how players were sorted into rooms the to the artists and project manager.

The non-programmers on the team were by no means stupid people and had been working on the game for quite a while by that point. The fact that we couldn’t explain our room selection scheme to them was a very strong sign that what we were doing just didn’t make sense. As we kept playing our in-progress game, it also turned out that it was extremely difficult to get the whole team into the same room. There were less than a dozen of us working on that game, so there was really no good reason for it to be that hard to play together.

In the end, we admitted our room selection logic wasn’t working and rewrote it to be much simpler. Players sometimes had to wait a bit longer for a round to start, but they could play with their friends more easily and stay in the same room with the people they played with last round. The simpler logic that was easier to explain was also a better experience for the players.

I’m not going to pretend you’ll never run into anyone who is invested in not understanding what you’re trying to explain to them, but if you give someone an overview of what you’re up to and they don’t follow it, think about whether you’re doing something overly complicated before you assume the person you’re trying to explain it to is just dumb. Complicated code is harder to test, harder to debug, and harder to change when you get a new feature request. It’s worth paying attention to seemingly unimportant signs like having a hard time explaining your code to someone else because it can save you so much time in the long run.