A little creativity.

I started a new job at a new company 9 odd months ago, doing what I and my career needed me to do, but not precisely what I love doing. It’s a bit like exercise if you don’t like exercise or studying something you don’t love. You know its the right thing to do because you’re learning and growing and that’s good for you, but you have to grit you teeth and get through it. Some days anyway.

While I’ve never really done work that most people would consider creative… well, let me pause here and clarify something. Most people — I think in this case, an acceptable generalization — would consider software development, programming, a technical job. Most people would also consider pure mathematics something other than creative. I believe both those fields are, in fact, extremely creative. I think the way Paul Lockhart described creativity in his essay “A Mathematician’s Lament” was a perfect description: creativity and creative pursuits are “a love of pattern-making”. Music, painting, mathematics and most definitely programming are pattern-making endeavors, they are creative.

While I’ve never really done work that most people would consider creative, I have been programming for a very long time. I love it. I know several language and I’ve done things in some languages many fellow programmers would perhaps consider both ill advised and sacrilegious. I haven’t programmed for a living for quite a while now, having learnt that my aptitude for leading engineering teams far outstrips my natural technical ability to write code. Managing software development and information technology delivery has come at the cost of doing work that isn’t particularly creative. I used to compensate for this by coding at home, by building websites and apps — I’m very proud of the app I built — and tinkering with Linux boxes I’ve got spread across the globe.

In the last year or two, I’ve done considerably less of the tinkering and playing programmer at home than I’d prefer but a long commute, a very… busy day job and more recently, the arrival of my daughter has reduced the available time for creative, attention heavy pursuits outside of my more ‘facts and metrics’ based job even further.

I was inspired to do a bit of writing recently — that, I’ll get into on subsequent posts — which made me seriously think of getting back into my blog. I suspect some web developers can appreciate this thought process: ‘I think I should start blogging again! Yeah!’, ‘Oh, my blog is old’, ‘Yes! I should first develop a new blog!’, ‘Clickity click… Yeah, this always takes much longer than I thought and I’m really busy… lets park this for a while’… which is rapidly followed by not doing any writing on top of the not making a new blog.

So, this time! I’m giving Medium a go. I’ve had this Medium account for bloody ages so it’s really over-due and I do need a creative outlet (that isn’t boss-level PowerPoint). I’ve got some stuff I’ve written that I think may be somewhat interesting to people so I’m going to post that and see where this goes.

Hi.