Design vs Coding
Coding for me is like solving a puzzle, its a game, the way it challenges my brain and pushes me to not just write a code but write a clever one is a lot of fun. It fills me with a sense of achievement that is indescribable. So when I saw this course I took it. Design had not been challenging me the way coding always has and I hope this course can give me that sense of achievement. All I know for sure is that creativity has never given me that joy that coding has.
Finding out about the history of technologies like Eliza or Cross Pad was interesting. I think interacting with Eliza really made me realise how much the concept of chatbots has progressed. If we compare Eliza’s responses to that of any chatbot that we interact with today, we find that there is a lot of difference in the experience. Which is probably why it never became popular in those days.
The two puzzles that we got in the begining of day 2 were great. I would love to solve more of them. The whole concept of looking at binary outputs for any problem is very intersting. It reminded me a bit of probability sums from school.
Terminal was okay, nothing very exciting about it but just that one python program where we printed “hello world” brought back a rush of memories for me because that was the first program I had done back in class 8 using java. This actually made me go back home and learn a bit of python and the basic syntax used in it. I hope python is as challenging and as exciting as java was and helps me do a lot of cool things.
As far as the importance of coding for a designer is concerned, coding does have the power to change the way a person thinks. Programming is brilliant. I have always noticed a difference in the way my friends who coded think and in the way designers here at Srishti think. I know that my logical and rational bent of mind is very often looked at as a disadvantage by designers here at Srishti but I feel it adds a whole new perspective. Creativity with logic is a great combination but I dont think this works for all sorts of design. As a UI designer, i think a basic knowledge of programming should be essential but I don’t think it is that important for other fields of design. Not everything works for everyone, for instance I know that those set of adobe softwares like illustrator and photoshop will always remain a little alienated to me. They can not provide me the home that strings, palindromes, arrays, functions and println’s always have. I think its a matter of where one finds comfort.
