The Creative Programmer (Creative programmer) (Category: SelfDevelopment)

The Creative Programmer (Creative programmer) (Rubric #SelfDevelopment)

I recently read this book by Wouter Grenefeld about creativity in programming. The bottom line is that Wouter sees development as a creative activity comparable to making music, not just a technical process. Moreover, the author argues that creativity can be developed and even gives practical advice on how to do it. The book was originally published by Manning, and translated into Russian by Peter Publishing House. I read Russian and did not notice any problems.

If you go back to the book itself, the author highlights the following pillars of creativity.

• **Technical knowledge (technical)**Without hard skills in engineering, it is difficult to be creative without knowledge of the technical base. I already did. told About the way to the staff engineer and how to pump hards to become a cool IC (individual contributor)
• **Collaboration (collaboration)**This is what is usually called soft skills, or rather here about effective communication in a team and the exchange of ideas. Recently, I have report on this subject
• **Constraints (restriction)**It is often the presence of constraints that stimulates innovation to overcome them.
• **Critical thinking (critical thinking)**doubting assumptions and improving decisions. I have a whole one. resource selection critical thinking
• **Curiosity (curiosity)**Continuous learning and diverse interests
• **Creative state of mind (creativeness)**Development of concentration and internal motivation
• **Creative techniques (creatives)**Methods such as using metaphors and brainstorming

If you generalize the main ideas, Creativity arises from the combination of ideas from different disciplines, which the author illustrates with historical examples. The author encourages “good theft” of ideas. (conceptualization) counterbalanced Wouter talks about the balance between intrinsic motivation. (for example, curiosity) and external (for example) This, in his opinion, increases productivity.

In the last chapter there are many creative practices from the toolkit of the writer, artist and engineer. So someone who wants to increase their creativity can take these tools and start practicing them. And you can track progress. Creative Programming Problem Solving TestTo monitor and measure progress in creativity.

P.S. The questions of creativity in software engineering are very important, for example, the guys at Google researched them and recently wrote an interesting whitepaper, "Developer Productivity for Humans, Part." 8"Creativity in Software Engineering" that I've been working on done before.

#Thinking #Engineering #SelfDevelopment #Software #Brain