Okay, I had meant to write this sooner but I had to harden up my website. Took a lot longer than expected, but whatever. I have quite a few hobbies, ranging from dancing to photography to videography. Can’t draw to save my life though, but that’s not going to be the topic of today’s opinion. Whether it be a visual art like photography or a performing art like music, I feel that engineers should have an artistic hobby (roll credits) outside of work.
Why?
As a software engineer, all I work with each day is code. Code this, code that. Building small things that combine to larger things. You’re probably thinking what does building small things that combine to larger things have to deal with art? Well, let’s take all the photos I have of Nebraska. Each photo is a small piece of art on its own, but I want to combine a bunch of them into a collection. Do I start by working my way from east to west, telling of a trip from Lincoln to Scottsbluff? Do I just wander around the Sandhills? Or do I tell stories of all the small towns along Highway 30?
It doesn’t have to be a photo collection either. The same principle applies to songs and albums, or even writing plays. Heck, painting or sketching works too. This is why having an artistic hobby matters: there is no wrong answer on where to start or what the overall vision has to be, and therefore you have lots of room to experiment and learn!
Experiment and Learn
I don’t know about you, but I just don’t absorb information by reading it. I have to combine that information with hands-on experience, especially if I’m to be applying that information. I can tell you I learned more when I tried the examples I found in JavaServer Pages for Dummies than just skimming over them.
Art is highly subjective, which is why there is no right answer. Same goes for tasting wine, or wine pairings. All that means is the worst someone can do is say they just don’t share your tastes. Doesn’t mean you created bad art (unless you’re Uwe Boll, or the guys who directed Mortal Kombat II). Lots of people love Picasso, but I’m not one of them. On the flipside, I’m a big fan of Ansel Adams and Albert Bierstadt but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people who don’t care for them.
Another aspect to art is criticism. Whether it be not trying to hit notes our voices may not be able to hit to making sure our subject is more in focus, this constructive criticism is vital to us understanding our tools to become better artists. When working with art, it is implied that there is room for improvement and no criticism is a personal attack. Well, in theory anyways but let’s just stick to the art classrooms for now. We’ll get back to real world shortly.
Unlike in art though, we can engineer software wrong. Really wrong, and get a lot of criticism about it too.
Getting it Wrong
Which story do I tell here? How about the user experience of a project I’m working on at work currently. Don’t worry, nothing secret will be revealed here.
The point person on this project on the business side was out of the office (parental leave) for several months when we really started the work on this project. That meant it was up to me to be the user experience designer, along with being the Lead Software Engineer on it. By Lead, I mean technically the lead as I was the only developer for the longest of time. That meant I had modernized some screens in a way that felt natural to me (we’re migrating a desktop app to a web application), but ended up not being what the user needed.
We needed to correct that, and approach it in a way that hopefully avoids that issue in the future.
Correcting It
I don’t know about you, but I tend to be a very visual person. I like seeing what I’m working on. The business partners I work with on a daily basis are the same way too. We did have a problem to correct, and so we decided to experiment a little and try out some prototyping tools to help us redesign the screens. I can say that we have really enjoyed the results we have got so far from that little experiment.
With my photography, I like to keep things fairly simple: some external flashes, a camera, and a simple post workflow. Same goes for my redesigns: simplify the layout, keep what information we do need, and seeing what we can remove. Doesn’t hurt that I’ve done some work with Illustrator outside of work, so Adobe XD wasn’t too difficult to pick up compared to some other wireframing tools I’ve used.
With correcting my folly out of the way, I think we can wrap this up.
Conclusion
Being artistic in my opinion allows you to gain experience in approaching problems from different angles, sometimes all at once. Building new applications from scratch often looks more like taking photos and thinking about the album theme later. On the other hand, modernizing old ones can look more like having a theme already and figuring out where the photos should go to tell the story. Sometimes the approaches are, and need to be, reversed to deliver the best product to your customer.
Art helps you define your vision, and teach you in a way where you can explain it without issue. It gives you room to be free to do what you want, and how you want to do it. You also learn how to handle criticism, and to know where you draw the line on what changes can be made.
It also is nice to not always be looking at code, if I’m to be honest. 😂