alt Hacker NewsThe reason great artists spend so much time developing their skills is that the result no one knew they wanted comes from skill and the new possibilities emerging from that.
So as a software developer now might be the best time to throw system design on it's head and develop without a direction but make sure everything is as good as one can forge it.
Surprising functionality and stuff not found elsewhere then more or less simply emerges from that.
Granted - that has a certain freedom and no pressure to make money as a prerequisite but so do the 5 years noted here.
"Perhaps paradoxically, the success of UNIX is largely due to the fact that it was not designed to meet any pre-defined objectives" is a direct quote from the Unix paper [1] that I carry with me as a reminder that software too can be employ artistic processes. By that I mean letting the processes and the medium convey information, too. A contrast with a pure goal-oriented approach, where the creation is constantly under stereotypical pressure, even before it has been given a chance to be manifest and be experienced.
[1] https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf