We play God when we run our code, breathing life into its lungs, with its own little Big Bang at execution time, exploding into existence.
Software development is a unique combination of creativity, craftsmanship, and technical problem solving.
Even as a young lad, I was this mathy science boy that.. also drew a lot. I’d go to school and just absolutely crush the life out of math. Then I would come home and draw these tedious, super-detailed drawings of comic book characters and dinosaurs.
In later years, these base personality traits would manifest in the form of computers and music.
Computers were the perfect machines; they could just do anything and everything. And they were a real hoot to take apart and put back together.
Music was the perfect artistic expression. It was something detailed and tedious I could try to master.
Moving forward in time, the two eventually merged in the form of software development. Here, we finally have something logically crafted, yet artistically creative.
Of the 16 MBTI personality tpyes, I consistently get typed as an INTJ, so I strongly suspect that myself and software development were always destined for each other.
Fast-forward to now: I have been immersed in a software development career for ten years now. It is a challenging, endless puzzle to be solved. But, also an abstract art form. And yet, a disciplined craft. It’s on the frontier, cutting edge, always evolving, never growing stale.
It also happens to pay well, of course.
And the only real tool required.. is a computer. The evolution of the desk has allowed me to construct my technical creations on a mere laptop, using concepts that I learned using a laptop, while listening to music on that laptop, which I previously created.. on that laptop.
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination ― Frederick P. Brooks Jr
I highly recommend software development as a career choice. I always encourage my non-programmer friends to at least try programming and see how they like it.
I cannot really imagine doing anything else.