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In this video we're going to take a look at the art of programming. And this is more of a talking, looking at some slides; just me giving an overview of what I call the art of programming. Programming is an inherently creative activity. You are just like an artist or a painter or sculptor, you know anything that you think of being real artistic. Programmer is in the same vein. You're sitting, essentially looking at a blank slate in front of you and you have to create something out of that. You have an idea, you probably have a vision. Ah, you might have a few ideas scribbled down here and there, but you have to drive that forward from your brain moving it forward. There's no wizards that are going to help you get through this. Yeah, there's, there's little wizards out there for, for various little programs that can build you some stubbed out frameworks to get you started. But they aren't going to solve you're problem. So, really, there, there's a lot of creativity that goes into programming. But, along with that, is that programming needs to be fun. And, what I mean by that is if your doing it professionally, that's great, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be having fun. You should enjoy programming because it is an inherently creative act, it should be fun. At times it's going to get a little drudgery. Ah, there's always drudgery in any kind of activity, but programming, for the most part, should be a fun thing where you enjoy that creative act. So let's, the act of creation. Just in general, where do you start? That's probably one of the hardest things on any project, is where, where do you start? And in many ways, it's start anywhere, just start. I often tell employees that I supervise this same thing, is that they'll come to me and say, Well, where should we start on this project, we're having problems getting going, and it's like, just pick a point and start working on it, and, and out of that will come some of the other things that you need to do. You, you'll see better which directions you need to work. Maybe you have to back up and work in some other area. But just the act of getting started, it, it's almost more of a psychological hurdle to get over to get it going. Then, then you, once you're started, it's kind of, where do you go? And you have to have a process that allows you to constantly check where am I going with this? What's my direction? And it's really important in programming because you can go down some blind alleys that you waste a lot of time on. Now, some of those are going to be educational little detours you have to take, but if you think you're going down the right road and it turns out it's completely wrong, that's a lot of wasted work. So you want to have a process where you're looking, where are we going? So you're building a more complete design as you work in your programming. And finally a big one, too, is where to finish. Where do you actually call a project done? Um, there's something called scope creep, where a project keeps getting bigger and bigger. People see some stuff on the screen and they start getting excited and they say. Well, let's put a button here, and, hey, can I do this, and hey, can I turn that on and have a little thing that flips around here? And meanwhile you're the programmer and you're struggling just to get the basic stuff going and you've just done enough to get the users excited and now they're pushing the scope bigger and bigger and bigger and expanding the project further and further and further. So, you have to at some point say this is the ending point right now. And that brings up another thing. A lot of times a software project, it isn't necessarily a start to finish kind of thing. And perhaps that's the wrong way to look at it. It's more of a cyclical kind of thing where you, you have this active creation. You get the project started, you get to a first version and maybe it has things that you, you want it to do but you can't get to them yet. So you put that off till the next version, and you maintain and fix bugs so it's the cyclicle nature of software that you really have to engrain yourself into yourself to actually understand how to create software and how to maintain it.