DEV Community

Cover image for Passion, Programming and Creativity.
Mtende Otis II
Mtende Otis II

Posted on

Passion, Programming and Creativity.

I read a lot of bios online, on GitHub and personal portfolios included. I see one of the most common things ever which falls in the lines of something like this

I am a software developer hosting a toolbox of skills like Go, typescript and Mongo. I have always had a liking to computers ever since I was a kid and that's how I got into it.

I want you to keep this small bio in your mind as you read the post. I recommend storing it next to your favourite song in your cerebrum :).

When I hear the word passion, it echoes back "something I would do even if I received no external reward for it". This has been the drive for most of the greatest works in human folklore and even history. One thing about passion is that it's not obsolete.

At the beginning of the semester, I would have vowed that I hated hardware. I touched my first Arduino (link) a couple of weeks later. With tears in my eyes, I built myself a circuit with a couple of LEDs. The reason I continued was that I got the chance to program a circuit so that was the silver lining in my thinking. After some troubles, I managed to get the circuit working. I managed to get the LEDs to be blinking. The moment I got it working, I felt the same emotions I do when I work on a bug for a while and I finally get it but that bug allowed me to learn more about the code. I can also equate it to when you put one concept you previously knew and the newly learned concept fits together with the old concept and form a steel frame of understanding.

What I am trying to reach is that if you love one concept of creativity you will love the other. The problem with learning new concepts of creativity is the valley of despair. In this valley, things usually seem like they are stagnant but they are the best form of foundation. Imagine if your codebase didn't have data structures like arrays, you'd have found yourself writing complex code which would be unnecessary. We brush off the valley of despair as "not passionate" but like all emotions, passion can be cultivated. The best way to start cultivating a passion for something is to not do it for applause or external rewards.

Computer programming is the peak point of creativity out there. I dare you to look around, you'll see elements of programming in everything(I'll gamble that every person who wrote a book on Object-oriented programming started with a sentence like this lol). Pick something that has a dose of computer programming and try it out. Go in with the mindset of a child: ask a lot, watch and try.

Top comments (0)