The combination of art and technology is becoming more and more of a common concept. There are more developers as artists, and artists as developers. I'm a web developer who comes from a fine arts background. I've always been interested in traditional and unconventional methodologies as an artist, such as drawing, collage, painting and coding. 

A question I'm often asked is:

How are you a developer when you come from a fine arts background?

I see many parallels between programming and art. My IDE (text editor) is a canvas and my code is raw material. It’s all just another medium for building, creating and solving problems.

I enjoy challenging how we perceive art and the ‘artist’, pushing the boundaries of what art is and what it can do. We can often think of programming as unintuitive, precise, and methodical. We can think that art is the contrary, a frantic expression of some primal creative urge. Yes, this is true for both programming and art, but not entirely. One thing that programmers and artists do have in common is that they’re both makers and doers, which is ultimately a creative pursuit.

This is quite a big topic to cover so here are a couple of my many observations in the workplace and through my personal experiences. I believe creativity is fundamental to the development of technology and the progression of society. To me, creativity means challenging ‘the’ perspective in a new way.

Creativity means facing your fears and mapping out a thousand different routes to reach one destination. It means searching for inspiration in even the most mundane places, and most interestingly, finding similarities and differences between two completely random ideas. 

Creative flow enhances your ability to learn

Creative flow, otherwise known as “flow state”, is when you have full immersion in your tasks that you are fully in the present moment, losing track of time, and being fully engaged. When we are in this flow state, neurochemicals augment the creative process which means we can take in more information, creating stronger pattern recognition and so amplifying our learning ability. These are known as the most addictive states of being, which creates purpose and happiness and as we know, happiness is contagious. As humans this is what I believe we are all striving for.

Using your brain in different ways strengthens it

The brain is a beautiful and powerful pattern organising machine.

Read the rest on Medium.