I stared at my coffee as a friend asked a mildly profound question: “what is your greatest passion in life?” Strangely, I thought of an exchange that occurred just a few months earlier while I was at the bank, opening an account for my software consulting company.
“What is the nature of your company’s business?” the banker asked.
“Building software,” my partner and I managed to respond with. Now suddenly fascinated, she looked away from her computer and at us, as if we had abruptly sprouted wings.
“Like Facebook?”
I did my best to suppress a laugh and simply nodded. I could hardly blame her. The 30-something-year-old banker’s knowledge of the domain likely consisted of the horrendous software they used at the bank, Angry Birds, and whatever insight she gleaned from watching The Social Network. About equivalent to my knowledge of banking.
I looked up from my coffee. Naturally, my answer would immediately gravitate towards software, but how to frame it in a way that made sense?
Building something that impacts people—making their lives easier, more enjoyable, or something to that effect—that’s really the goal of any engineer, but it’s an amazing ability that software developers possess. The modern-day alchemist, quite literally turning electrons into social media and flight simulators and bank transactions—things that delight or captivate; things that help us exist. We’re the janitors of data, or is it plumbers? But we’re also artists.
Software is a craft, an art, and not one that everyone is capable of doing (but certainly capable of learning). But what is art? Something that exhibits beauty in aesthetics, perhaps visually, perhaps audibly. We think of Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We probably don’t think of Twitter or Facebook and certainly not the ATM you withdrew money from.
Web designers may argue that websites can be beautiful, and they’re right. Software can be both a visual and aural stimulus, but these are really just superficial observations. The same way I say “Huh, that’s pretty cool” after seeing the Sistine Chapel. Others may appreciate it more, or less.
Many would argue that the purpose of art is to evoke emotion from its audience. There’s probably a lot of truth to that, but to me, art exists on several different levels. There’s the immediate aesthetic beauty—what the eyes see and what the ears hear. There’s the emotions that it evokes from its audience—this makes me happy, this makes me sad, this makes me intrigued. And then there’s the appreciation of the craft: painters admiring a painting, not because of its obvious beauty, but because of the technical prowess it demonstrates. Software is no different.
I read something once that said software developers are never impressed. I don’t think that’s entirely true, or at least the entirety of the truth. Beyond the superficial veneer of beauty, there are the inner workings of incredibly complex systems, riddled with algorithms, design patterns, and all the things that make programmers swoon. And they run like well-oiled machines. That is art, but art that only others who share the trade can enjoy. There is elegance in code like there is elegance in the prose of a novel. The difference is in those who are able to marvel at it.
The great thing about engineering, software or otherwise, is the problem solving involved. There is no end to the amount of exceptionally difficult problems that need solving, and the way in which those problems are solved is an art in itself.
I doubt many people associate the words “art” and “software,” but there is as much creativity and craftsmanship in building software as there is engineering. It’s this drive, to build great products that affect people, that I consider my passion and my art.
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