The idea from this week's reading that I will be responding to is Design Principle 4.1:

Principle 4.1: Programming is a Creative Endeavor

I chose this principle to respond to because it made me reflect a lot on my own journey, specifically as it relates to my growth as a computer scientist. Thinking back, I can recall feeling drawn towards computers and coding as early on as middle school. I had always been a big math and science kid, but I had a strong creative streak that I developed through painting and playing music, and the idea of being able to apply my analytical side to the process of creation through code was a fascinating prospect. But I never had the opportunity to take any computer science classes and the thought of teaching myself was a daunting one.

As high school progressed, I figured that my window of opportunity was closing, because all across the internet, I saw people my age and younger who seemed to already know more about programming than I could ever hope to learn. I remember asking one of my counselors at a summer program I attended back in North Carolina called Governor's School whether everyone who studied CS at college got their start in high school or earlier, and his reassurance that they did not was something I decided to keep in mind as college got closer.

So I arrived as a freshman at UNC with an undeclared major, but an inkling that I should take the intro programming course offered, and what a decision that was. I remember the feeling of falling in love with computer science over my first semester - the exhilaration I felt at the chance to be both analytical and deeply creative all at once, the rush of watching something you wrote compile and run, the feeling of endless possibility. UNC's Computer Science Department was founded by a man named Fred Brooks, and there's a quote of his they like to put up around the building that goes something like:

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

And that's the way I still feel about it today, though I have been discouraged to find that the original spark of insipiration requires more careful tending than I had hoped. After several summers of industry internships, I've found it's very easy to take the tools of computer science and work a career devoid of the creativity I find so invigorating. That's why I was so excited to take classes like this one during my time at Stanford - because they very much keep that spark alive and growing. The life of a creative coder is a path that I am still very actively nurturing, and I'm excited to see where it ends up.