We often talk about code as if it were fast fashion: everything is constantly changing, nobody knows everything, only the superstars make a living, and it's terrible for the environment. A lot of that's true for the technology industry.

But like the arts, the industry only has so much to do with the thing itself. The art and act of coding itself is much more akin to sculpture. Rather than adding things on top—funding, frameworks, new technologies or advanced degrees — the joy of coding comes from getting carving away, bit by bit, towards the expression of an idea.

The number of messy or inefficient ways to write a program are almost endless. The simplest and most elegant solutions are only a few.

You probably know more of these than you think. For example, "reducers" are a powerful programming concept: they take a list of items, modify them in order, and combine the results in interesting and surprising ways. Writing a complex reducer is considered an advanced programming skill, but a classical musician would recognize it immediately as imitative counterpoint:

phrases = [ "I'm up in the woods", "I'm down on my mind", "I'm building a still", "To slow down the time." ] woods = [do_the_voice(phrase) for phrase in phrases]

Taking the normal artistic process—investigating and transforming life through making—and using code instead of paint or music is simpler than advertised: recognize the patterns you already know from art; then implement them. Learning syntax is the easy part.

Artists understand this principle intuitively. Books like Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Kimon Nicolaides’ The Natural Way to Draw have taught atomic, elegant methods of looking at the world — and drawing it — for decades. Very similar skills apply to the learning of code.

Like having good relative pitch, the mark of a seasoned engineer is the ability to see these patterns. In fact, when a good professional looks at a piece of code that doesn’t work as expected, you will notice them physically squint as they “see” the pattern behind the syntax of the programming language; they look like they’re doing a contour drawing.

This is what Lightmode offers: coaching to see the code behind the code, using the skills you already have as an artist.