creativity

Here are five great books about creativity. These are very good books where you can experience different aspect of creativity: How it became a culture in a creative company like Pixar (Creativity Inc), how one person can fight to maintain it in a huge industry (Orbiting the Giant Hairball), the importance of mistakes in the creative process (The Art of Making Mistakes), how an author can make crazy idea with everyday things (H2G2) and finally in the best example of Art&Science I know, magic (Magical Mathematics).

As a Chief Technical Officer, I see my job as trying to notice as fast as possible our new mistakes and adapt. Working in an unknown environment with new technologies, avoiding mistakes is impossible. We do mistakes, all the time. Everything fails all the time. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services However, even in this environment, we can be sometimes scared to try something new because of the fear of failure, this is a human reflex that probably helped our ancestor to survive while dangerous animals ate more risky individuals.

Since the second half of the 20th century, we know that every language in which we can write a Turing Machine is a language with which we can write every single possible algorithm ever possible to write. Another way to say it is that for many years we know that all the programming language are equivalent, no one is able of more than any other, end of the story. As a consequence, we could live happily in a world where every programmer is using the same language to talk to machines, but it’s entirely not the case.