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In a meeting today I was asked if I was accustomed to dealing with images straight from the designer, say in Adobe Illustrator, or Photoshop, where I replied that I was a Photoshop 2.5 kid, must be close to 15 years tinkering with Photoshop.

I immediately went into my preprogrammed response that I code to keep myself close enough to the design phase or that I code as there is more work for coders than there is for designers, which used to be the case, but not anymore. I get a lot of requests to do design. I have a lot of experience under my belt designing websites of a certain flavour, and I now code to avoid design.

Starting out with wet on wet oils on canvas when I was like 7 - 13 (RIP Bob Ross), the first time I saw a gradient rendered in Photoshop I knew that this was the tool for me and my art career. And she was. I designed handbills for bars, and raves, and concerts. Created animations, visuals, great times.

But BAM came the internet and now here was another thing that drove me to perfection. I had the same drive with painting, and guitar (20+ years on that now), with computers and now code was exposed in this fledgling little world called the internet. Hooked.

That was in or near 95. Working professionally from the internet since 96. Lot's has changed since then, but before I stray too far from the title of this post, I have found my new art, called code. Not just css or design, or the integration of the two. But code, well written code is an artform to itself.

And not only do you get beautiful languages like regular expressions, you get to actually benchmark the worth of your art. In performance. I find that traditional art is interpretive and it's worth varies from person to person. If code is wrong, it is wrong. If you don't know why, you will find out why. And it won't be interpretive.

Code comes in only two shades, black and white. The artform is between you and your application, and possibly not at all for the end user. At least not in the traditional way. Sometimes I will come across a regular expression, or piece or c# that makes me rethink the way I think. Isn't that art? I come across brilliant coders who think they haven't an artistic bone in their bodies, yet write elegant, self-explaining, beautiful code never once considering it art.

There is brilliance with a drudgery to it, repetitiveness and cumbersomeness, yet very effective. Then there is brilliance that does all that and does it in a way that shows you that you still don't know anything grasshopper. If not changing the way you approach related scenarios, at least getting a bookmark.

My art is my code now, I can still do the oils, guitar, and photoshop like yesterday (maybe not the oils), but I truly find that as I learn more about patterns, practices and the people and thoughts that came before me, I hone code into another artform within my life.

A very challenging and rewarding pursuit.