Code is my Art

I have always been a great lover of music and to an extent I can appreciate good ar, my talents in these areas however are lacking. I have always thought it to be one of the great injustices of this world, that someone who loves and appreciates music so much, lacks the talent to create music of their own.

This topic in general struck a chord with me whilst I was watching television one day, whilst nursing my self through a flu, there was an interview with an actor and they mentioned the phrase “this is your art” and other phrases along the same lines “suffer for you art” etc. This got me to thinking. What is my art? and why is their art considered an art over the things that I can do, and at the end of the day I concluded 2 things

1. Art is simply a skill
2. I do have an art, and that art is coding…PHP coding

I think the skills of so many coders out there are so heavily underated, some of the creations of so many digital artists. Things like Facebook, but not only that the thousands or parts that make your day to day like more entertaining, make it easier and generally just fit in without you even noticing.

There is something beautiful about a well written PHP application, the way it flows the way everything ties together, and the way user actions have been predicted and accounted for. Even in a nicely configured editor with syntax highlighting, looks like a picture to me, and the intricacy fascinates me. Reading other peoples well written code, will keep me tied to the screen until I manage to decipher every part of it. Anything that can engage you for as long as code can, and can have so much detail and can achieve so much can be nothing more than art.

Coding requires great skill, practice, patience and the ability to think out issues in so many different ways, it isnt something that everyone can do but it is something that some do with such beauty, that even if you only understood 1/10th of what was going on.

To me, my code is my art, and I suffer for it. I lay awake unable to sleep some nights as I try to think through a concept or how to achieve something I need to in an application I am writing, or simply trying to grasp an idea. Coding is something that piques your interest and in a way truly does envelope your life, you often find yourself thinking through a task on the computer and trying to come up with a way to simplify it, you end up spending 3 hours writing code to achieve something you could have done by hand in a mere few seconds and when you have finally finished that application, ground breaking function or class that you dreamed up in the middle of the night, you sit back, you appreciate what you have done, and in the Open Source world, you put it out there and you hope others appreciate it, much in the same manner as an artist puts their work out there.