I’ve always rejected the term “Software Engineer” because I’ve met very few people who write software like an engineer would. To me software development ebbs and flows between science and art, probably like any creative endeavor.
Certainly I’m not the first person to think this way. People much smarter than me, Paul Graham for example, have already written about this. That’s why I pay attention when people in other creative fields give advice.
Chase Jarvis is one of those people, and he recently wrote 10 Things Every Creative Person Must Learn. It could have been written for programmers, any of this sound familiar?
Simple is good. Almost every photo that is bad has too much information. Outside of technical basics, the number one reason that most photos fail is because there is no clear subject. Often this is the case with design, film, fashion, you name it. Remove clutter, remove distraction.
One of my pet peeves is unnecessarily complex code. Simple code always beats clever code, with fewer opportunities for bugs.