Another Syndrome?! 🔗

In reality, I am merely saying I had impostor syndrome, but not the workplace kind, albeit its a bit related. Unlike the kind many of us have early in our careers, my relationship with creativity has much more complicated roots. My definition of what creation is has always been mired in a deranged triangle of, Art, Income, and Moat. The outputs of creation should be classifiable as Art while being consumable to make Income, but without reducing my Moat that protects my ideas. How does one create something from inspiration and spend their time mostly worrying about how to keep others from copying it and stealing my profits? When I say it out load it sounds as insane as it is. This fuels my FOSS rebellion; give away whatever I write because in the end a product is the Moat not the software, which is only a vehicle. I am not saying that work can't be creative but its not a source of inspiration, it is a profitable way to expand my skills, like the opposite of academia in a way. I have spent my time in academia as well, paying fiats to its own kind of feudal system contrasting the word games and politics of the enterprise world. In the enterprise world you have to be rather special or lucky to get involved in novel projects; I think I have been rather successful in the latter.

Somewhere the enterprise weaseled its way into OSS, and a lot of it seemed to turn into a freemium where a focus on Income could be associated with free. I see less and less of work being broadcast back from the enterprise to the community, a project now goes from launch to subscription in a single go. If you spend any time on LinkedIn, your feed will be filled with peddlers promoting vaporware and "Stealth Startups." I am not event just talking about AI. I can recall in a previous role we were looking for a static and dynamic security tool for our Ruby monolith. In case you don't have familiarity with the language, it heavily supports meta-programming (code generates itself) and before there was real AST support, it dramatically resisted analysis like this. Of course, CodeQL started peeking out at this time, and that's the solution I organized a deal for overall, if you don't know go check it out. Anyway, the number of vendors that would pull us into a demo call knowing we were using Ruby and knowing their tool provides nothing more than a Brakeman wrapper would still try to sell us a subscription. The demo would never happen, and it was almost like we should buy their product because they existed, or worse, bought Brakeman and bolted on a UI that I didn't need. Brakeman was eventually forked and is a solid project, it was someone's creative endeavor that got lost to "Income."

You should be picking up the conflicts now.

Creativity, by my definition, is giving some reality where only inspiration was present. It doesn't mean we need to have a new idea, just new to us at the time.

I used to say that in the job we are just plumbers wiring up dependencies so the toilets flush just right. I still think some of that is true, because there was space for invention long ago, the frameworks were toolboxes and not ecosystems. The latter is good for throughput, take my agency away and give me a thing that works, so I can get something done, is a big win. Its why pipes have standard diameters and schedules, so we can add a valve to an existing line and a tap for our new washing machine. I don't want the plumber to have to think too hard, there is an application and the right medium to move that water. Ultimately, what I want them to be good at is preparing the pipe, brazing/soldering, and fitting selection. Is there artful plumbing, yep, but it's in the detail, Art tends to compete with Function? In the software world this is why we despise cleverness, we are focused on the function, and inventing our own pipe is a challenging endeavor.

So, taking that into account, creativity might seem a little out of scope for my field. So I want to set down some rules for the push-pull. If you are creating for income, your creativity isn't focused on the software its channeled to the human product, Kudos humanitarian. I don't wanna really build a product that feels like it would lead me to talking to too many people. If you are creating for beauty, your creativity isn't focused on the software; its focus is syntax and semantics, Kudos you poet. If you are creating for fame, your creativity isn't focused on the software, it's focused on your brand, Kudos teacher. If you are creating for experience, your creativity isn't focused on the software, it's channeling your need to control your world, Kudos explorer. I have yet to find the answer that results in a focus on the software, but I think it might be somewhere intersecting, simulation and game design. That's not the message, though; what I concluded is just because I don't much find passion in building products or fame doesn't mean I am not creative.

I don't need to call myself an artist to feel whole, but I do want to feel I could joke about it from time to time. I am driven to feel Authentic in my Art, which is probably only something I can truly come to terms with. The problem has always been that I can create something from nothing, and I can do that expressively such that I have caused others to feel emotions in a wide spectrum. But so much of that creation intersects with the need for pragmatism, protection, and income that I could not realize it as a creative act. Problem-solving is the brush, and the code is the canvas, but the production is mechanical. The momentum of creating software for the purpose of money has all but destroyed it as an artistic pursuit. The revelation started when I needed something to write about, I don't want to talk about Passkeys or Nix really, I would like to talk to others about them, but the novelty is gone. I just stopped worrying about if what I was building was a good idea, and the world opened up to me, I built pointless beautiful things that would be only useful anecdotally and I was free. I just dub them, crazy ideas. I have a pile of pipes, can I make a snowman? Or, could I make a form send data directly to a server on my phone without a persistent connection? The value is solely the novelty and what I will learn during the journey. That is the creative act I want to align with, and I have been doing that my whole life. I only failed to see the truth because I kept injecting the requirement that others need to love it, or it needs to be a revenue stream. The techno hippie in me firmly believes that software is the closest thing we have to a hidden force that can shape society without being interfered with by politics and money if we just committed to it.

If you want to peruse some of the crazy ideas, they are over here This Week's Crazy Idea

"The immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes" - T.S. Eliot