Jeffrey Arts

Combining creativity with development.

Week three | February 28th, 2024 | sell Technology

Jeffrey Arts calls himself a developer, as well as a creative artist. His ventures often combine these two passions of his, which is evident in the way he realizes his ideas in both his online and offline projects. With both a background in frontend development as well as product design, Jeffrey's creative 'spirit' challenges the ideas of either by blurring the lines between traditional design and coding, and a more experimental approach to art.

Webdevelopment ecosystems as toolboxes

If creating websites is something you do regularly, it makes sense that after a bit of time, setting up new projects from scratch starts to feel like going through the same motions repeatedly. Jeffrey's advice to keep things efficient as well as fun, is to stay consistent. Use the same core technologies as much as possible, he says, and create tools to support your workflow, which you will then be able to use repeatedly.

Personally, Jeffrey has created his own command for the Command Line Interface (or the The Terminal) which automatically sets up a boilerplate for his code. What he really wants us to take away from this is,

Create an ecosystem for yourself in which each elements strengthens the one before and the one after itself.

But... why?

While Jeffrey's advice was understandable, it kind of conflicts with the ideas of developing ourselves as programmers that our school keeps trying to imprint on us. The web is constantly changing, features added and removed, languages invented as well as fading into insignificance - so why is Jeffrey's advice to hold onto the same things? Is it comfortability? Some sort of echoed sentiment that says to hold on tight to what you're good at?

Not really. It's all about optimizing that workflow. Sometimes, you mess something up and you're not entirely certain what. If in that case you have a toolbox which contains your project cut into small pieces, it's easier to navigate between them to not only locate the previous version you'd like to return to, but also identify the mistake that broke everything in the first place.

When a functionality works, store it in your toolbox.

The importance of failure

Jeffrey's motto in web development, and anywhere else actually, is Try; Fail; New Truth; Succeed; Reflect. Failure never really disables you from reaching success unless you let it. That is why it must be utilized as a source of inspiration for future ventures. Try to always gain experience regardless of outcome, and let yourself be inspired to the point of continuous creation.

Conclusion

While the majority of Jeffrey Arts' guest lecture was about observing and seeing his projects in action, there were unmistakably a few important lessons to be learned. I very much like Jeffrey's approach to web development and the fact that he is unafraid to go to new lengths and realize his dreams. That's something I'd like to take with me as a web developer, as well.