Rebekka bangs her hand on the table.
“That’s stupid!”
“No, it’s not! It’s 10000000% the true answer!” – I yelled out.
She angrily takes a sip from her Caramel Machiatto as a few patrons in the café around us shift their eyes towards us.
I sigh.
“Look, honey... It’s a super simple premise...”
If you were shrunk down to the size of a nickel and put in a blender that was about to turn on in 60 seconds, the best thing you could do is jump!
Bekka scoffs – “But you’re tiny! How could you possibly be able to jump out?”
“Fleas can jump super high! You can jump higher when you’re tinier,” I counter.
“No, they can jump high because they’re FLEAS! Our legs can’t make us jump high at that scale 😂” – she fights back.
And just like that, we kept going back and forth on what I learned was an infamous Google interview question, where I couldn’t for the life of me, in that moment, articulate why the hell the answer was “just jump.” 🤣
This conversation wasn’t a one-time thing for us, though.
We LOVE playing with hypotheticals when we hang out
Not only is it extremely fun to come up with crazy scenarios that put people on the spot and test their decisions in impossible situations, but it also helps make you a lot more creative. And that’s a bonus when it comes to being an exceptional frontend.
Creativity is a skill that makes you stand out
Like, yes. I know every company is always looking for a smart developer who can “come up with creative solutions to problems”. A phrase that’s become a cliché at this point. But... how do you even hone creativity? And what does “being creative” even mean?
At least for me, creativity is mostly about having fun and doing what’s entertaining for you personally. It’s about combining ideas and solutions from different contexts in unexpected ways – even if it’s unconventional.
Creativity is what helped me come up with my old viral “How to get somebody fired using Git” article.
As for the work I do in the frontend, creativity is wonderful for solving really tricky problems where the cause is not exactly obvious.
Let me know – How are you using creativity in your daily work?
P.S.
Another terrible, terrible, and sad hypothetical I came up with last week was...
“You know Clifford the big red dog? What if it worked in reverse? The more you loved him, the smaller he’d get? Until *poof*, he’s gone.”
Rebekka didn’t like that one 😂