The Aim Of Art

Aristotle said,
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. "

Recently, a project that I had been working on for two years went into production. This was a project where I actually did some coding. I have not done hunkered down coding for several years. Needless to say, my skills were a bit rusty on many levels. Let's face it, the programming world had passed me by on so many levels. Basically, I knew enough to get the job done. Was I worried? Absolutely! Everyone who reads my blog, knows that I'm not a fan of Microsoft's development tools. On this project, I chose some unconventional tools. I chose Flex for the user interface and FileMaker for the database. This was a high end application. Using these tools; I'm sure some very smart computer scientists would say I was nuts. I tend to choose tools that focus more on the artistic design elements versus the technical elements. Plus, these technologies are very easy to use. However, in this case all the logic would tell you that this approach is suspect. For a period of time, I agreed. I can't tell you how much I worried about whether or not FileMaker would choke. I also worried whether or not Flex would hold up. Many sleepless nights over this.

Live day approaches and I'm one nervous dude. Well, live day came and went and the application was a raving success. Not because I wrote some great code --- this organization had hired its own programmer that I'm sure fixed a great deal of my programming flaws. Nevertheless, I was still worried.

Then it hit me. I was worried for the wrong reasons . I was more worried about the tools instead of worrying about the design. Would this design solve the problems this organization was facing?

Don't get me wrong, I'm still a little nervous about the choices I made on this project. However, it's much easier to switch out the tools than trying to find a better design. The significance of this project was the fact that we had found the answer to a big problem that was troubling the organization.