The more I develop, the more I realise creativity is at the heart of a developer’s job. We had a discussion about creativity with my brother, he is a developer too by the way. I consider him as one of the most creative person I know, and he said to me “creativity is just solving problems”. Then I thought about it. The important word of that sentence is “solving”. What he means by solving is not postponing it, not working around it, or forgetting about it. It’s solving the problem by making it disappear.
Great creators do exactly that. They mainly wanted to solve a problem for themselves at the beginning. If there is no ready made solution, you have to be creative. Doh! But believe it or not, generally we cope with most of the problems we meet. Sometimes we don’t see the problem, sometimes we just don’t care, or sometimes we just don’t find a solution. We might consider creativity is finding a solution. But I think it is in seeing the problem and caring about it. Well caring long enough until you solve it. There is a bit of perseverance there as well. Obsession some would say.
To make it clear, I’m not specifically speaking about creating a business out of a creation. There is quite a step between creation and making money by the way, and I’m really not qualified to speak about it. I’m mainly speaking about our everyday life, about our everyday software development. As developers we spend at least 8 hours in front of a computer, with a lot of inefficient tasks we carry on regularly without even thinking about them. And we generally have the skills to make them more efficient. All we need is just caring about these problems we put to the back of our minds, and great ideas followed by great creations can come out of it. We are still at the beginning of a software era, so much still need to be done.
Matthieu Scholler 12 February 2013