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Michael Paleo
Michael Paleo

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Let's talk about art ...

In this post, I'll share my point of view of an interesting fact that we face every day without seen it (maybe).
Going straight to the point, I see software development, as art.
First, let me tell you that always, when I communicate to others, I don't expect that people think the same way, I think that all is relative, and we are very lucky to be different to each other and have a variety of ideas, this could be something to discuss in another post :)

Before we start, I'm going to paste right below the definitions of science and art "according to Google" as an introduction.

Science:

The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Art:

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

Now, think about what do you do every day at work, guess what, you are an artisan!
We write beautiful programs caring each detail of it, making the code gorgeous, writing awesome docs, and stuff.
At certain point of our career we care of every single detail of our projects, and we seek the excellency of it, applying optimizations, renaming things, adding and removing spaces, break-lines ...
So, when you are at this point, you finally can see your software as a pice of art, you see it and think "Oh, this is just awesome, I've made it ?".

On the other hand, we have the "Art vs Science" fight, so let's talk about it.
I think that there isn't such line to cross here, are we making science ? yes, and art as well!
Life is not a box, there's not a black and white case, and we cannot encapsulate things, we just need to accept that.

Influences:
Every thing has a start point, mine was the C# language and Laravel, an awesome PHP framework that I'm been using for a while.
Several years ago, when I started to study programming, C# was my first language, In that time, I was consumed by the .NET ecosystem and I learned to respect it and love it.
C# was awesome in that time, but the docs ... that's another story. Back then, all the technical docs were awful and doesn't teach well how to start or use things so you had to learn by doing and that takes a lot of time.
Some years later, I met Laravel, my PHP skills where pretty awesome, but I was in the stage that I was needing a framework for some big projects and Laravel was my choice among others. Thankfully, was the best decisions I ever made, Laravel docs are just perfect and looks pretty cool. Their docs have every single thing that you need to get started, and one interesting thing, is that the people behind Laravel believe in this words, actually, this is the header of the main page:

Love beautiful code? We do too.
The PHP Framework For Web Artisans

With this main influences, I started to seek excellency and beautiful code in other programming languages and frameworks, and I think that it's one of the best experiences in software engineering, the fact of carrying knowledge between programming languages, frameworks and communities.

using System;

class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Share some pice of art on the comments please :)");
    }
}

Thanks for your time

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