Coding or Cooking?


Blog, Computers, Recipes / Monday, February 20th, 2017

I’ve been trying to decide which of the things I did today was more creative, coding or cooking. Neither of them was particularly intensive, both were creative in some way, and both had satisfying results. Trying to decide which one is better isn’t really the important takeaway, but I want to weigh each one anyway.

Coding

For work, I needed to start laying out a landing page. I was given a rough design of what it should look like and a handful of functionality requests. Typically, these are the kinds of things I would give to a developer but my developers are very busy at the moment and having myself do it could potentially save the company money. Laying out a page is no problem, especially when I consult with another staff member on design choices. I’m terrible at design. I know what I like, but the picky people rarely agree with me. The two of the functionality requirements I said I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do. They’re more advanced and I’ve never done them before, but I said I’d give it a shot. One of them was having an element on the page stick to the top as you scroll past it and the other was having a menu visually indicate the section you’re viewing. They worked together, actually.

I managed to get both of the pieces working as requested. But a lot of the code I took from online tutorials and plugged it into the page I was working on. So, I didn’t really create the code, I just  took it from someone else and hoped it worked. It’s satisfying to see it work, even knowing it would have taken me weeks to write from scratch.

Cooking

For dinner, I threw a take and bake loaf of bread in the oven, and a couple swai fillets in the broiler. To pad the dinner and try to be healthy, I also decided to whip up a vegetable dish. The bread is a no brainer and I had prepared the swai in the broiler before so I knew it would taste great, which it did. The vegetables, however, were the challenge because I wanted them to seem to be something we hadn’t had before. What I ended up doing was tossing some carrots, corn kernels, green onions, mushrooms, and kale into a sauté pan and cooking them together with some seasonings. Ellie and I both agree, the vegetables were the tastiest part of the meal. But thinking about what I did, it wasn’t particularly complex nor was really planned. It just kind of worked out in our favor.

So, which was more creative? Cooking or Coding? In both cases, I just kind of hoped things worked out and they did. I took knowledge I already had, and applied it to a new situation. The more I think about this, the more I think they’re both on equal levels with each other just in different categories.

What did you do today that was creative?

Leave a Reply