Programming is art
I’m a web developer so, naturally, I am highly opinionated about web development, and I want the whole world to know what I think about JavaScript.
I love JavaScript.
Not because it’s the best language in the world, or has the best tooling and ecosystem in the world (it kind of does, though, for right now. I know that’s subjective, but I don’t care). I’m not going to pull up benchmarks or stats about how Node.js is good for networking applications but not necessarily right for all scenarios. It’s simply because I came to an epiphany recently — I was not born to be a developer, and my goal is not to convince people of how smart I am because I can write code. Before I started coding, I was something else. I w̶a̶s am an artist.
Once upon a time, I made hip-hop beats for my friends (who are almost all still musicians and loving it) and we sat around and pushed each other to be more and more creative. There’s a very rewarding feeling when you create something, no matter what it is. I think we could all benefit from this kind of dynamic in our work, so that it feels less like work, and more like what it is — art. It’s what I look for in an ideal software team, ultimately.
I always saw JavaScript as just one of a myriad of skills developed and nurtured as a youth. My journey into JS began in 2003, when I realized that there was some code you could paste into your Myspace profile page and make crazy things happen, like alert("Add me to your top 8, you know you want to"). I liked knowing the user had to click “OK”, because I was 13 years old. Then I started offering to customize HTML and CSS on my classmates’ Myspace profiles, for a fee naturally, and then I got bored, because I was a teenager and had too many hobbies.
Fast forward to 2017. America has made history in electing our first Russian president, and I’ve been a career web developer for nearly seven years in “tech”. For me, writing code has always been a craft—something to practice and refine in an endless feedback loop of new frameworks, libraries, patterns and anti-patterns. The one thing I can honestly say I’ve learned in this process, is that the only way to stay sane in this “game” is to love it like my 13 year old self loved locking your browser’s event loop until you either clicked “OK” or frustratedly hit “Back”.
There’s always the “Like” heart button, and if you’re really adventurous you can hit “Share” too.
