Book Review: The Creative Programmer

Review

Title: The Creative Programmer

Author(s): Wouter Groeneveld

As you might imagine by the title, this book is about improving your creativity, focusing on the software development world. But really, the book contains almost as much content about improving focus and productivity, as it does regarding innovation and reaching the appropriate state of mind. And yes, it is full of software development examples and scenarios, mostly about creative individuals, but also of situations where your environment hinders and even halts any creative attempt.

It is not a long read (slightly above 200 pages of meaningful content), and at times I felt there were too many examples, but you will find plenty of good advice and tips on it. Statements like "everyone can be creative" might sound obvious to some people, but following the ideas and techniques explained in the book, I think that everyone can become a better thinker, achieve better "flow", and detect things to improve (e.g. the collector's fallacy [1] resonated with me a lot).

Topics like Deliberate discovery, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, how broad or deep you should learn things, being a generalist and/or having multiple interests, and as I mentioned, quite a few techniques to improve concentration and achieve flow, are just a few highlights of what you will find.

I heard about the title via a podcast interview with the author, and I'm glad I did. This is a book that I would recommend to any colleague, even to non-technical ones, if it wasn't so full of tech examples! [2]

[1] Just hoarding notes, not looking at them ever. I'm guilty of doing this at times.

[2] Not only has plenty of videogame development remarks, but the author clearly likes the topic, because a lot of them are around game-dev. I think that many times they lack the proper context for people not versed in the subject... but I enjoyed them.