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Code is beautiful

Ever since I was young, coding felt like an impossible dream—one that involved mysterious languages like Python and C++. I bought books about these languages, but I never had the courage to dive deep into them. Perhaps I lacked the motivation.

Today, at 34, I now feel a renewed energy when I consider how useful coding skills can be. It's a language that speaks to machines. Instructions put in logical order, translated into binary code, tell the machine where to switch on and off various transistors. At least, that's my very primitive understanding of how it all works.

The idea of this blog is to share my journey with you—a very chaotic journey of finding what I truly want to do with my career. I studied graphic design and switched to media design. After almost a decade working for two companies, I always thought of myself as a creative designer, aka "the artist" 😄. Be it print, videos, UX, UI, or mood boards, the visual domain always felt to me like a very strong connection to my soul.

We, as humans, probably need to be part of a "tribe," and my tribe was always design. Today, at this stage of my life, I've made a very unexpected decision: I will learn how to code. I will put all my heart and energy into learning how to do it with intention and intensity. And I will share my journey here. Is it a good idea? Not sure. Can I write in a way that will be interesting for you to read? Not sure either. But hey, here I am, doing my thing. And on the journey to learning how to code, I will be sharing some "golden nuggets" I discover along the way.

Why is the title of this article "Code is Beautiful"? After working for almost a decade in the design field, I always struggled to "see" or "feel" the impact of my work. Of course, there are analytics, trackers, and all these fancy statistical tools that, in theory, could indicate how your design impacts the users. But for me, after seeing my work published online, I never felt like, "Wow, good job, you made something great." The feeling was always neutral. And today, design is almost a copy/paste; you simply follow the trend. With code, it's different. Every line is important; every instruction, variable, and piece of data is part of a bigger picture. And it's useful. Very useful. It impacts society. It helps people. It saves lives. That was always the element I struggled with in design: the tangible. This is why I find code is beautiful, not because of its visual beauty, but because of its crucial role in our civilization and the potential impact it has.

This, of course, is my own opinion. Other people might find design more important. And maybe one day I will change my mind, but today that's the way I see it.

See you in the next article 😉