My Dad taught me how to paint when I was a child. After his tours in Vietnam, he used the GI Bill to study Fine Art at Berkeley. He felt strongly about art and always wanted to encourage others to pursue it, if not as a career—which is a difficult path—then as a hobby.
Fortunately, I could blend the creative process with my chosen career path as a Software Engineer. Before moving into Systems Engineering and Management roles, I focused heavily on User Interface design. Knowing how the user uses a given system is as essential as the system being developed and maintained. A software engineer is focused on writing beautifully structured and scalable code and is not nearly as cognizant of whether or not the end-user truly needs a certain feature or if they’ll even understand how to use something that is delivered.
I found a way to incorporate my experiences with art and design while using another part of my mind to recognize and peer-review high-quality code. The thing is, I still found a gap between the kind of freeing creativity that I sought and the limit of my creativity when building software. I wanted to make stuff that nobody is going to use and complain about, and its existence is meant to be seen aesthetically and serve no other purpose.
That’s where my painting comes into the equation. I paint for fun, and I paint whatever I feel like painting without input from a customer or other developers. My art exists to allow me to create something out of nothing and distract myself from requirements and rules. My art is stress relief, and the process of creating it offers me unparalleled peace and contentment.
These are the days when I really wish I could paint more frequently, but everything keeps getting in the way.
