I have always considered myself to be a rather creative person in nature. I think being able to express yourself is what makes everyone unique. In an increasingly rigid world I find creativity more necessary than ever. I value the time that I have to explore my creative hobbies: particularly, photography, guitar, graphic design and drawing, all of which allow you to exemplify my unique perspective on the world in an environment the world can actually understand and view.

A recent thought of mine has been thats been reocurring is, just how much creativity can something as rigid as software development truly be? Going through school teaches you that most problems have an optimal approach, specific to each specific use case, with an optimal implementation that allows for very, very little room for any differentiability in the field. Adding onto this is the near constant complaints regarding AI diluting the market with vibe-coded slop similar to what's been seen in the digital art world with new AI image generation capabilities. All together this made me think, what creativity truly can be seen in this career path, an aspect of myself that I often take pride in.

While the list is endless in an environment as broad as software, I think a large part of the creativity stems from how much you can simplify a system. I think back at how computer scientists have been able to build layers upon layers of abstraction to make systems with complexity beyond our comprehension into simple programming languges, systems and programs, iteratively throughout time. I struggle to think of anything other than creative to think of this. There are endless ways that you can simplify anything with immense creativity, requiring encompassing knowledge regarding what you're working with. I think often, the complexity can take away from what you're building, in the way that something complicated for the sake of lack of knowledge is not nearly as impresive as a complex system created with very little to work with.

These are all just thoughts but I think its a mental mind-block that stops a lot of engineers from pursuing great things out of a fear of not being able to make any meaningful contributions.

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