> as if the vague 2 sentence requirement from their spreadsheet that I have to turn in reality doesn't require any creativity to implement
Do you really need creativity, though? Unless you’re working in uncharted territory and you’re just building some CRUD app like 90%+ of software in the world, you don’t. Software engineering patterns exist, and even so much of the innovation that supposedly came out in the last 5 years are mere iterations of the same patterns.
And the purpose of being creative with a solution is not creativity for creativity’s sake. Clarity, maintainability, scalability, should strictly be the primary goal of every line of code that you are writing. I wouldn’t debate that a code that is so clear and intuitive and easy to scale for so many people has achieved some degree of art, but that should be a side-effect, not the goal in itself.
I'm getting a little tired of all the "creativity" in UI myself, a.k.a. reinventing the wheel.
I use a dozen different-looking web interfaces per day, often internally inconsistent in the same application. Here, it's OK Cancel, there it's Cancel OK, another one is Yes No.
There are two buttons on the "modal" dialog in a web page. One is a different color. Does pressing Return mean anything? Escape? Can I tab through them? Does the modal with one required text field (e.g. 2FA entry) focus that field? Does Ctrl-V work? Is it some bizarre custom design that can't keep up with a normal rate of typing?
Will it allow my password manager to autofill fields? I saw an interface recently using Angular that didn't even provide name or id on the text fields. Thanks.
The desktop app side of things is equally annoying. Either it's electron/nwjs, or it's attempting to look cool instead of just following the guidelines.
You know what takes creativity? Shoe-horning new code/requirements into code that is not abstracted in any sane way. The end result doesn't make me look like an artist though, it makes me look like an asshole for not rewriting the whole mess. But alas, that wasn't factored into the current epic.
Do you really need creativity, though? Unless you’re working in uncharted territory and you’re just building some CRUD app like 90%+ of software in the world, you don’t. Software engineering patterns exist, and even so much of the innovation that supposedly came out in the last 5 years are mere iterations of the same patterns.
And the purpose of being creative with a solution is not creativity for creativity’s sake. Clarity, maintainability, scalability, should strictly be the primary goal of every line of code that you are writing. I wouldn’t debate that a code that is so clear and intuitive and easy to scale for so many people has achieved some degree of art, but that should be a side-effect, not the goal in itself.