Do you have to be creative to become a developer?

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I suppose it could be seen as creative or extremely thoughful planning as there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

Lets say you are developing a website for someone, you would need to know what they needed so you would need to speak to them, but as you're designing it, you would surely come across something that both parties hadnt thought of and then work that into what is required at the end of the day if possible.

People can be creative in many ways where other people wouldnt have thought of something, look at all the inventions nowadays where you would think, what, I could have thought of that but didnt

Ed

 

I lot of development is more akin to being a plumber or a mechanic. So its not that creative, but yes for sure there are creative elements.

If your language becomes less popular you simply learn another one. In reality they all have similarities.

Every piece of software or firmware ever written had to be written by somebody, why not you?

 

Scripting is simply progamming in a dynamic language, so yes it is development, just generally at a much simpler level.

 

I have a love and hate relationship with coding.

I did Java back in college and I enjoyed learning it and troubleshooting other people's code for example the IDE shown errors and correcting the code to work.

My problem with coding is where to start programming software from scratch?

If someone came up to me and asked me to create a program that compared mortgages - I don't know where to start haha.

 

Some of my .NET programming books were written by System Administrator turned Developers.
My CUDA programming course was taught by a Computer Science lecturer that used to be a Systems Administrator that retrained as a College Professor.

Generally Programmers were either always programmers or some started as DBAs. Its also not uncommon to find programmers who are also Scientists, Mathematicians, and Engineers.

A computer is a tool, to get the most out of the tool you need to be a programmer. Its the modern day calculator. If you can't code you are basically a user, you may be an expert user, but you are still only scratching the surface.

 

Generally they should have taught you to code from scratch at college, that is their job.

You start with simple programs 1-2 lines then build up, to 50, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000 LOC, etc.

Its a gradual process.

 

What sort of software have you created for work projects, David?

Have you done software for different sectors or only focused on one sector such as health or finance etc.

 

Industries I have worked in are Finance, Telecoms, Pharmaceuticals, Defense, Software Houses, Transport, Insurance, Oil and Gas.

I have written embedded, desktop, client-server, thin-client and web site based solution's.

No I have not limited myself to one sector.

 

I try not to be big on titles or ego, but yeah sometimes i trip myself up.

IBM let you simulate a quantum computer on their cloud.
https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/experience

Basically qbits can be in a quantum superposition and hold all possible values allowing you to solve non np complete problems, but yeah i've never tried and not many people have.

 

Good evening all.

I sat next to a software engineer on the train today - nice chap and gave me a lot of great advice in getting into programming.

I should of asked him do you need to be creative to be a programmer but it wasn't necessary because he already made his point that learning to code is like learning any other skills such as learning the guitar.

 

I have written / amended various bits of code (I forked a WordPress plugin that ties in to vCenter for reporting purposes, my fork allowed for multiple clusters, something the original developer hadn't considered and was happy for me to fork because of). I have a script out on Git that I used to mass deploy VMs from templates before but I couldn't ever code an app or debug code as I just don't have the brains for it and I decided that years ago.