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Discussion on: How do you stay creative as a dev?

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svemaraju profile image
Srikanth

I will kick off the discussion. Here's something I scribbled on my notes when I was wondering about this.

  • Creativity comes from having freedom to imagine new solutions. For example you are asked to solve a problem and you are free to do so without having to be constrained by legacy codebase.
  • Creativity comes from constraints. Paradoxical to the above, creative solutions can often arise from having to satisfy many constaints. For example, you have limited computational resources, time, developer resources etc; and you will have to come up with a solution that falls under such circumstances.
  • Creativity comes from lateral thinking. Getting exposed to different problem domains can enhance your awareness and allow you to borrow solutions applied to different problems to your own problem. For example you explore different programming langauge and get exposed to a completely new way of writing code. You can bring that to your main programming language and apply to different problem domains.
  • Creativity comes from depth. When you are able to study a field in significant depth, more than what many people do. You are able process problems in a better way, you can connect various obscure dots in that field that can lead to creative solutions
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svemaraju profile image
Srikanth

Here is something I recently did that led to some creative thoughts.
I didn't connect these things until later. I have been reading some open source code recently and it has opened me up to new things.

  • I started checking out underlying implementation for a open source library that I regularly use. This made answer some of the questions I had like - "what happens when I run this command?"

  • I also went through a ruby on rails codebase (it was actually the DEV/Forem codebase :-) ). I work primarily in Python/Django so I was just curious how does other framework solve the problems I face. That answered some of my questions around "how do I structure my logic or how do I write this class".