This blog post is adapted from a talk I gave. It is a personal account of why I like to build things

Building software is special. It’s a process through which, anyone one of us can make something valuable for anyone, anywhere.

Building Software is an Act of Creation

It’s easy to think of programming as just another routine process. But I want to show you why it’s much more than that. First and foremost, it is a creative process and this alone makes it special. You’re putting something out there: you take some symbols, write your code and create something greater than the sum of its parts. Not only do you create the software itself, but that software has the potential to be valuable. Being valuable is defined by usefulness - if someone finds your work useful, then it is valuable. Generally, I think usefulness is the goal of any software project. Now, this usefulness does not strictly require someone to use the project, but it may be as simple as you code something to learn a new concept. The fact that this opportunity to create useful software exists, that anyone here can build something useful is amazing.

Scale Doesn’t Matter

The next unique aspect is that software provides the opportunity for an individual contribution to have an outsized impact. But I want to go a little bit further and say that while this factor exists and is a great unique feature of building software – it doesn’t matter too much. In fact scale doesn’t matter at all. When you build it doesn’t matter if your creation is useful to only one person or millions, it doesn’t change the fact of what you’ve done. All that matters is that you engaged in building something, putting value out there into the world and having the possibility to delight someone’s day with your creation.

Delight The Unexpected Gift of Building

On this point of delight, it’s an unintended consequence of building. When you build, you build not only for yourself but for others around the world. I want you all to think of a time where you were stuck on a project, frustrated with the block. You turn to search or ask for a solution and out pops some project, repository or code snippet that helps you get over the block. It may not even be when you’re coding, have you ever wanted to do something and then you find someone has built that before? How did this make you feel? I can tell you how I felt. When building a house rental price scraper I came across a repository with 30 or so stars which allowed me to connect Django + Gmail1. Upon finding this I saw the magic in creation, a project somebody put out there and possibly forgot about provided me with utility!

That feeling is one that you can share with other people when you go out and build!

AI’s Impact on the Act of Creation and Building

Finally, as an AI enthusiast I must touch on AI in this subject. To some, AI may be seen as a destroyer of the beauty of building, but I think it is the opposite entirely. In its current state people interact with AI in many ways, but all ways support creation. Let’s group all users of AI into 2 categories, the expert and the non-expert. Both benefit from AI, the non-expert can build out ideas which they may have never done otherwise and the expert is enabled to skip the grunt work and explore the fringes of their ideas even further. The manner of building may differ, but the act of creation still exists and this is where the beauty lies. The magic is not taken away, rather it’s made accessible to an even wider group of people. Undoubtedly, as AI gets stronger the process of building will continue to evolve, but creation will still exist, only we may need to find new ways to experience it.

Thanks for reading! I hope you see now the beauty in building and take some time to recognise the magic in your own work.

Lastly, I implore you to go out and build! Every one of you has the ability to share the magic of creation with the world

Yusuf

1 https://github.com/dolfim/django-gmailapi-backend