A story of loneliness as an developer + artist

An Iron Will, by David Sun, Selling here

I think its best to describe this piece as like a coffee shop ramble to a friend you don't see often enough.

This is a piece on my path to where I am: not quite an artist, not quite a developer. It's to my recollection, how I got to where I am. I am not famous nor important, just thought to bring out a story that may resonate with a few others.

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"Are you a developer?"

To my designer friends I say: "I am more of a developer than a designer"

"Are you a designer?"

To my developer friends I say: "I am more of a designer than a developer"

This quantum state of professional being implied in my answers have been the default response for the last few years. I never gave it much thought about what I am or what I can be. It was merely two interests I fostered from a young age that, to me, was very similar.

"Aren't the two, art and coding, well, different."

I always thought those two the same, as mediums, forms of expression, paint brushes. There are merely ways to express my ambitions, dreams, and nightmares. I wasn't switching on and off my "computer brain" and "design brain"; it was one brain operating two different mediums. But as time goes on, I found myself increasingly uses my interest in more polarizing ways. It was either just art this week or computer science the next. I had to make binary decisions on something I thought too nuanced to attribute to a boolean flip.

Often I found myself chasing my peers in each interest. I could never catch up in my raw technical knowledge of my CS peers. I absolutely abhorred technical interviews and would become lightheaded at the sight of a binary tree coding problem.

"It is a necessity for our industry" I get from many of my peers.

The rebel in my can't accept that. I create. I produce. I use. I learned coding to realize my ideas, to create experiences, to delight users. I learned all these frameworks, burned midnight oil debugging for the sake of the craft, not to get a job.

But as recruiting season for interns nears, I was woefully alone. Everybody was scrambling to catch the interests of a sleepy recruiter at large company X or Y with a great signing bonus. I recruited, but to me it felt empty; this was not how I wanted to do computer science.

In the world of art, I felt, well, stupid. My brain too rigid from computer science, I theorized. Back when I was at my teacher's art studio, I would summon all my creative energy to create, to produce, to use. I loved it, but again felt like I was missing the mark. Charcoal I drew, but never the best. Block-printing I printed, but never the best. (Not to say I wanted to be the best) Ideas flowed to my fellow peers while I had to wrestle with a drought in my head.

My last experience doing fine arts was 2 years ago when I was creating an art portfolio for college. I knew I was applying to only computer science schools (for many reasons I won't delve into). Only 3 schools accepted the portfolio and my odds there were not great. Yet, I did it. I created an art portfolio.

I moved mountains to get better at traditional art. I slept with my brain processing why my portrait rendering did not meet to my teachers expectations. I came hold, bloodied with charcoal. I looked like a Jackson pollock painting if he used charcoal not paint. Looking back, I do not know how I summoned the energy to draw as much as I did.

Half way into the art portfolio process, I snapped. I was working but going through the motions. The deadline drew knew, but I was exhausted. My only goal was to finish, even if it meant crawling. By the end, I delivered, in my eyes, a subpar art portfolio.

I was too narrow-minded. I tried to explain my struggles as this discombobulation of art and coding in my works. I didn't push the boundaries of thought with my works; I was merely demonstrating the skills I accumulated that summer. Skills I soon lost.

I left art to pursue computer science at college with a sour taste. I felt like I didn't live up to my expectations or the teacher's. At one point, god knows why, I couldn't summon the spirit to meet him. My spirits were broken and I was in a state of limbo for half a year. I did not create, produce or use.

It was during this time, that someone reached out to me in ways very poetic. At the time I was blind to this persons effort to raise my spirits. I never properly thanked the person, a thank you I intend to repay in time.

This part of my life story is one I commonly brush over. Not due to unease, but due to my personal lack of understanding. I don't know what to make of it and couldn't understand the actions I partook during my art portfolio days.

"How long did you do art?"

It's a common question brought up when I accidentally slip and bring up my art background.

"For all my life."

I drew since I can remember, spent many summers at my teacher's studio honing my craft. I had dreams to be a concept artist for a game studio. For whatever reason, I left that dream for a different lifetime and pursued the great world of coding.

I first was exposed to programming in my high school's introductory course on Java. I struggled at the time with the first few chapters. Then divine intervention came in the form of my dad. Father, trained as a electrical engineer, had more than enough coding chops to sort out my simple java calculator program. Within the span of one long night, we worked together and with his help, programming clicked.

After that, programming class made sense, but it was just a class. Art was king with no dispute.

"At what point did coding become what you wanted to do?"

Second year of programming. I was in my schools APCS class and in it, I did ... nothing. I was coding but the projects felt like the rehash of last years work. I was bored and looked for more.

To my luck, I met two seniors in my class. Both worked and created side projects on their own. Node.js? Ruby on rails? What is this madness? I was enamored by the capabilities of these great tools and wanted to learn. I signed for online courses, went to my first few hackathons, and grinded out side projects.

I found a new medium to create and produce.

As a programmer, I always had an affinity to front end work. To me, that brought the most delight. It was the kind of work that I can observe the delight in a user's eyes. Work that reminded me of art.

More importantly, front end work allowed me to realize my ideas. I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur. Always dreaming up ideas and things to create. I loved the risk taking, the challenges, and the grind.

As a front end developer, I slowly learned the tricks of the trades of a UI designer. I learned to operate Sketch, created my own UI, browsed fonts.google.com, and talked in designer lingo.

At the time, art and coding were separate entities in my life. I coded or I was doing art. I didn't mixed the both and made measures to even separate the two hobbies discretely. In retrospect, I was resisting two torrents of water trying to mix; it was futile.

I coded and I drew until the days of my art portfolio. Days I described earlier. Days that broke me. Days that rebuilt me.

After a lovely summer break post art portfolio, I was ready to return to the world of coding in school. I brought out a new array of side projects and joined different organizations to surround myself with great people. I knew that I would not be touching fine arts for a very long time. The path I chose would not permit such a distraction, I thought.

"So you just stopped doing art?"

I reasoned that designing interfaces was my way of expressing my art side. I told myself that the artist in me became a designer. I still had an artist's eye; I could still pick out the nuances of a good logo, or critique a modern piece of art. As the semester continued and recruiting season soured, I was faced with an existential crisis of who I am.

Am I a developer or an artist? For many of peers, they only know me as a developer. I kept my artist background hidden. Suppressed it as if it was a dark past that would ruin peoples' perception of me. For many, they knew me as a front end developer who happens to have an eye for design. I was content with this label and allowed it to continue to be used.

Slowly I started to share my past as an artist. As an experiment initially, but the feedback was clear; people were surprised that I had dreams to be an aspiring concept artist. I grew more comfortable sharing about my history (why I'm writing this now), but unknowingly, I was drifting away from the crowd.

I took more pride in being an artist, but felt adrift in a sea of developers. I was going with the motions in a industry I thought I loved. I hated all the technical hoops people needed to jump over to simply reach a point to create and produce.
It felt like a repeat of my final tenure at my teacher's art studio. I was going through the motions; I was doing contract work, side projects, boosting my resume, explaining to my friends why I thought AI was the future.

Vowing to not repeat my mistakes, I took the time to pause and recollect my thoughts. Going into second semester, I needed to do meaningful work, I told myself.

But what is meaningful work? At the time, I was interested in blockchain (this was the boom of 2017 where prices skyrocketed). It was merely an interest, nothing more. I joined a club and later (after the crash of prices) found new love for the world of blockchain.

It was a new medium, a powerful one that unlocks new applications and have the potential to replace old industries. It was a medium I was dying to acquire. I found a new fire in myself. This is meaningful work. I spent free timing reading white-papers, learning Solidity, and peering into this new world of steemit. I was enamored, but cautious as I navigated the treacherous world of scams and ICOs. It was a new medium to create and produce with.

For one week, for whatever reason, I took a break out of my blockchain cram and played around with generative art.

Man, I was hooked. I went sleepless for a few nights fine tuning an algorithm I created to create abstract pieces of artwork. For the first time in my life, I consciously merged art and coding. I felt ecstatic. The algorithm worked amazing and created works of art I loved.

Eventually, the blockchain world crept in. Not willing to let go this synthesis of art and coding, I did the next best thing: I brought blockchain into the mess. At the time, cryptokitties were booming and slowing down the whole Ethereum mainnet.

I thought. "There has to be a way to make ownership of digital artworks possible"

The challenges were there. How do you induce scarcity in a world of easily copyable pngs and jpegs? What does it mean to own something on the blockchain?

To cut it short, I would later spend half a year creating a project I call WeeeArt. It is my attempt to solve the quandary of creating meaningful value of digital ownership with blockchain. I didn't want to slap just blockchain on the problem and call it a day.

Without getting to self promotionally, I would love if you guys check my work @ https://art.weee.network. The artwork you see above is my generative algorithmn artwork and is currently sold on the WeeeArt marketplace.

Sorry for the shoutout.

For the first time, I managed to merge all my interests into one project. I always thought I knew what it meant to love what you do, do what you love, but WeeeArt blew my old thinking out the water. I was dreaming about the side-project and was working on it every waking hour. I moderated myself with time to have fun and play games, but my focus after interning was WeeeArt.

For a long time, I felt lonely, scared that I was running the wrong way. In the world of art, I was alone as a developer. In the world of coding, I was alone as an artist. I couldn't wrestle with this reality and so I compartmentalized. I was very close to accepting this state of mind as reality. Thankfully I did not.

Now, I feel empowered. I finally found a way to express all three interests in one project. Through the launch of WeeeArt (very, very, young right now) I found many others with similar interests. I loved the work of my peers in the space and I am getting great feedback.

(By now, I would be pointing at my friends phone and forcing him to follow WeeeArt on twitter @weeeart)

Here I am now, grinding on something with heaps of uncertainty. I accept that I probably will fail trying to realize the visions for WeeeArt.

Loving every moment I spend on it. Hating every moment I spend on it. This project feels, real?

As I write this, I recollect at my past with a smile. I know I'm young; I got many more years to go and look forward to what's next. Maybe we live to feel lonely.

"So what are you then, David?" My friend would interject.

With a pause, I answered.

"Developer of a few years, artist for many more. Creator forever."

Thanks for sticking this long.

-David Sun