Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

I knew literally nothing about code at this point. But I struggled through it with W3schools (this was 2011, before the fancy learning platforms). The hardest part was fighting my own lack of confidence, because I had been made to believe that I was artistic and therefore bad at math and science. I never realized until that point how deeply I had absorbed this idea. Pushing past it has been a marvelous experience.

Anyways, I realized that I really enjoyed writing code. The next year, in 2012, I started learning JavaScript. About a year and a half later, I met someone who got me a junior dev job at a startup in NYC. Been doing the startup thing ever since.

As far as applying my artistic knowledge to IT work, I'd say it's been a struggle to stop applying it. At first, my approach was very creative, and I quickly saw how disastrous that is when you're working in a team. I would catch myself trying to find some other way of solving a problem than my co-workers, because I didn't want to "copy" their work. Solving artistic problems means finding your own unique solution, but solving programming problems means almost the exact opposite.

There are other areas in which my creative side does come out though. I recently had a job where we had to reverse engineer a financial API that was not public. This sort of quasi-hacking is kind of perfect for creative people because it forces you to think outside the box.

Regarding the impact of my art background on the job: im recognized as the team expert on making charts, visualizations, and documentation. I have been able to improve our processes by applying a clean visual approach to describe and document our work.

After getting through all the courses that interested me I dropped out to travel and then fell into a few interesting jobs that kept me otherwise distracted from going back. I would 100% do it all again. The only thing that I'm super upset about is that I did't fall into the live coding community while I was there (this was literally happening at the same uni https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1FSsUV-8c).

One mindset that it solidified in me was when building things come up with the concept first, then figure out how to make that happen. That may be easy, or it may not. But at least what you're making will be worthwhile.

I work in the audiovisual industry today running an R&D lab for a systems integrator. We create presentation spaces, high-end corporate facilities and VC suites (which are still apparently a thing), a little bit of broadcast work, some stadium projects and lots of large format displays. When I'm tied into projects I'm usually end up rolling with some systems engineering, DSP programming, a bit of embedded dev, UI work and network engineering.

About to begin something new and rather exciting too.