I got a BFA from my state university in "Digital Arts", which for me was a combination of filmmaking, ceramics, and graphic design. I didn't start programming until my last year of school when I wanted to make stupid simple blinking lights with microcontrollers[1]. I agree with lots of responses in this thread about the roles of conceptual integrity and openness to criticism. The other thing I would add is that my pa…
This is like a clone of the comment I was about to write. I also had classes from that fellow, and share your sentiments almost exactly.
BFA student turned full stack developer here. I wanted to actually share WHY artists can really excel in this space, both positive and negative: 1. We've been trained to critique, and communicate issues constructively. This is absolutely essential to working quickly, the sooner you realize there is an existential problem with what you're doing, the sooner you can work through them. I've become an absolute user story…
Yes. Many artists have the skills necessary to become great advocates for the user because they have developed a healthily individualistic attitude.
I'd say artists are a bit less conscientious, in general, than CS graduates, which makes them less well-suited to managing technical complexity and avoiding future problems. I wonder if your idea that artists are good at detecting technical debt might be something specific to you, rather than a generic trait of artists?
I did a BA Music, which was very traditional for the first two years (analysis, criticism, composition) but concluded with some amazing modules and projects in Max/MSP/Jitter/Processing. Followed it up with an MSc in Computer Science, looked into careers as a developer but lacked the experience/aptitude for a coalface coding job and was hesitant to go into IT consultancy. Ended up opening a board game café with some…
How do boardgame cafes make money? Do you charge per hour for a table?
We charge per person for a four-hour session (£4), plus the margins on food/booze/retail. Only 8 months in but so far, so good!
I will finish my degree in creative writing next month. I've been working as a software engineer for almost 27 years now, but I have noticed that my ability to architect and write complex software has improved during the time I've been studying creative writing.
The skills necessary to build a complex novel—writing characters, scenes, plots, and pacing—seem to have translated quite well into building complex software applications. I never consciously applied my writing skills to my software development. I just recognized that I was going through the same mental processes for both one day, and that the quality of my software, and the speed at which I could write it, had improved.
BFA student turned full stack developer here. I wanted to actually share WHY artists can really excel in this space, both positive and negative: 1. We've been trained to critique, and communicate issues constructively. This is absolutely essential to working quickly, the sooner you realize there is an existential problem with what you're doing, the sooner you can work through them. I've become an absolute user story…
I think studying art also helps you to recognize function and form, even in code. I know that the code I've written during the last few years, since I started a degree in creative writing, is much more cohesive and elegant than the code I wrote during the first two decades of my career.
Totally agreed. Actors and artists have to develop a thick skin or else they would whimper daily. :D Any job where you are sort of putting yourself out there in the form of your work can be quite demoralizing, especially with the wrong people in charge. Programmers can be just as touchy about their work as artists--I've seen it personally. Some of this may have to do with cultural diffs. Some cultures seem (at least…
To a degree, the same goes for scientists. Having anonymous peer reviewers telling you the past six months of your professional life has been a waste, because this was done by a Czhechoslovakian in '73 (paper never translated) and turns out to be uninteresting, can be quite demoralising. Or like one of my first papers, when sending it to a very good journal, having one reviewer say "this is all wrong" and the other s…
Don't professional software developers feel the same way about crafting a masterful function, only to find their feature had already been implemented years ago?
Somehow, this industry thrives in reinventing the wheel in slightly different ways - once a process is implemented mathematically (in code), it has to be reimplemented again, in slightly different terms (another programming language). We bikeshed in that it's cognitively easier to manually reimplement the function, instead of mathematically determining how to "rephrase" the math in the other terms. When you want 2 wheels, making a slightly different wheel is mentally easier than copying the existing wheel - in terms of coding.
Master in fine art here, with a focus on print making with lithography stone... as you can guess, not a lot of work, and hoping to get a show and sell is not exactly something where you get lot of money, even if you're not bad.
Since luck and hope ran out after eating too much pasta for a while, I jumped ship when a friend ask me to join him at his small shop — too much work for one guy, and I seem to know a shit or two about programming, being a true old school geek.
So we started doing iOS dev together, and with some work (first with the programming iOS for dummy, in 2009) I did get good at it, as with some PHP/Python... well, whatever was thrown at me.
I would not say my art background is especially useful in my day to day. In fact, in all honesty I have no idea how it is for everyone else... Being honest, curious and eager to learn is what has pushed me forward the most.
There's downside though of not having followed a formal curriculum : lack of knowledge in algorithm, math... But well, working diligently about those helps. I know I won't ever be able to apply to Google or other company alike because of that , but I don't care. I've worked for small shop, startups, big telco on main product, so there's always a path forward :)
I have a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics because I didn't want to take a biology course required for the bachelor of science.
Works for me, as I consider mathematics more art than science (i.e. it's mostly useless), but this is probably not what you had in mind by "arts degree".
I don't apply my mathematical artistic knowledge at work. I mostly used my degree to impress employers to get programming jobs ("ooh, maths, this guy must be smart," ha, right), and I do mathematics on my own for the cold, austere beauty of it.
Master in fine art here, with a focus on print making with lithography stone... as you can guess, not a lot of work, and hoping to get a show and sell is not exactly something where you get lot of money, even if you're not bad. Since luck and hope ran out after eating too much pasta for a while, I jumped ship when a friend ask me to join him at his small shop — too much work for one guy, and I seem to know a shit or…
If someone made a book/course on algorithms/math from an arts background, I would buy it in a heartbeat.