No livestream today. I have a cold. Sniff. Snivel. Atchoo.

I threw a poll on Twitter while I was writing this. So please weigh in if you are on there.

I was an artist then I took a career to the knee

I've mentioned in various conversations that I'm almost a fully trained librarian. Meant to do library science or lend out books. This was the path I was on because I couldn't cross the threshold of trust that it takes for someone to give a junior dev a chance. Then I got that chance and I left the library world behind.

Before then, sort of in a high school equivalent, I chose art at school. I used to draw a lot. I don't so much these days but I rarely back down from a visual challenge.

At the time I wanted to be a webcomic artist. Inspired by people like Tycho & Gabe doing Penny-Arcade, Piro doing Megatokyou and an ever-growing roster of cool comics. These people were doing more than just the comic, they had to wrangle their own website, forums, shops and all. Drawing + Web skills I could do an it felt like something I was suited for. I never ended up getting that rolling. I probably spent more time experimenting building webcomic websites than I spent drawing comics.

Finishing a comic is a lot of work. Much like shipping a product or taking software to production. A comic needs a script, the art, the layout, the lettering and finally needs to fit into a larger picture. A product needs the thing itself, the marketing, the sales, the admin. Software needs to be coded, tested, configured, deployed, maintained. Nothing is ever as simple as the first intense hours of enjoyable work.

I don't very often discard pieces of my identity. Somehow I still consider myself a low-level pencil artist, a Dance Dance Revolution player, a thai boxing enthusiast, a climber and a LARPer. In spite of not doing any of them for a variety of time-spans. Some I hold more dearly than others. Art is a bit special though. I really don't feel like I've stopped doing art by spending most of my creative effort coding.

Most of my code is for clients and essentially ends up being corporate in nature. Corporate art is barely art in my heart. But the process of creating software to me is not primarily an intellectual pursuit. Or maybe the process of making art isn't primarily an emotional one for me. I'm not quite sure. But I experiment to build experiences that can inform my gut and then I trust my gut a lot.

If I need to figure out why I think something would work I couldn't tell you whether I'm back-solving to derive reasons that support my gut or actually thinking it through methodically with intellectual honesty. I'm of the belief that we as humans aren't nearly as capable of intellectual, unemotional logic, as we want to believe. But we are great at patterns and fuzzy, meat-based logic. And as such we can build up a very good estimate of reason and logic.

We'll argue until we're blue in the face for our very logical viewpoint which comes straight out of our fears and values.

I don't feel like I stopped doing art because I feel like programming is mostly art. I imagine a ton of people share this and a ton of people don't. Maybe I'm mixing art and craft conceptually in my mind. I don't know. I may just be pretentious like that. I don't consider making my vegetable beds art, that's more craft and labor.

I guess one thing which steers it towards art for me is that I rarely churn out the same thing over and over again. I've never been in the seat of "oh, another Rails client, I'll use X, Y and Z, standard CRUD, here we go again". The spacing and pacing of my work has meant I'm always doing new things with new tools at any given place.

Even in Elixir. First client was Elixir but not Phoenix, second place was Phoenix and Absinthe but I mostly did other stuff, current client I'm doing as much Elm as anything else. First was solo-consulting with extreme autonomy, second was mostly joining and working in a team setting, current one is running a team I've assembled.

I can only pull strands of what I've done before and used them to inform how I should navigate what I'm currently doing. There's no template that makes sense to me. It feels more art than science. I know for sure I'm not doing science.

The challenges and satisfaction of success is similar too. Struggle, struggle, struggle, success! Or flow, flow, flow, result. Depending on the challenge of what you are trying to get done.

So I do programming and feel I'm doing art. And that ain't half bad as a job.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you taking the time.

- Lars Wikman