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On Creativity in Software Engineering and the Role of Generative AI

If one were to ask people on the street to name creative jobs, I would not expect software development to be mentioned very often. On the other hand, there are many tasks and activities in the daily work of a software developer that seem very creative to me. I would also describe myself as creative and developing software can be an outlet for this creativity.

In this article I want to explore if software engineering is creative. But this is not only a question of categorization. I want to use this exploration to get a deeper understanding of what creativity is. And I also want to think about the effect of GenAI on the work of software engineers and their creativity.

How do Personal and Company Identities Shape Open Source Contributions?

Imagine that you are a maintainer of a widely used open source project relied upon by developers worldwide. Being a maintainer means, that you get to decide which contributions by external contributors get accepted. Now, there are two contributions. One from an individual contributor and one from a person that you know works for a certain company. You know that the individual contributor has worked on the code they are contributing in their free time and you really like the quality of their work. The other contribution is also of high quality. Would you treat these contributions differently? Should you?