As a software engineer, I was equally at home with architecture, coding, and problem solving. But it was problem solving that others noticed most - perhaps because fewer people excelled at it. A former boss once wrote in a recommendation: MartÃn's problem solving capabilities are already a legend. He is capable of finding the "obvious" that others fail to see. I did not ask him to write that. He chose those words because he had seen the results of my work.
What does it mean to solve a problem? If the solution were known, there would be no problem. The essence of a genuine problem is that its elements are hidden. You cannot see the shape of the thing you are looking for. You know only that something is wrong, that something does not fit, that somewhere in the tangle of code or logic or system behaviour there is a tiny element out of place - and until you find it, nothing makes sense.
The search involves trials, simulation, narrowing. You follow one path and it leads nowhere. You backtrack, try another. Intuition and experience guide you, but they do not guarantee anything. You wander. You test hypotheses that turn out to be wrong. You binary chop. You stare at logs and traces and outputs, looking for the anomaly that does not belong. And then - sometimes after hours, sometimes after days or more - you find a tiny dot that is out of place. A single value that should not be there. A timing mismatch. A boundary condition nobody considered.
When you position that dot where it should be, everything changes. Like dominoes falling, all the unknowns that have been troubling you start to resolve and explain themselves. The system behaviour that made no sense suddenly makes perfect sense. The bug that seemed impossible becomes obvious. This is the moment of illumination - the eureka moment. And it brings tremendous pleasure. A satisfaction that is almost physical. The release of tension held for hours or days, replaced by clarity.
In the photographic creative world, I behave similarly.
Photography captures reality. When I start to transform that reality into something closer to the feelings and emotions I had at the time of shooting, I am embarking on a search. The destination is unknown. I do not begin with a goal, with a vision of what the final image should look like. The task is a genuine search for something I cannot yet see. It is like traversing through a tunnel. In some tunnels, where the path is straight, you can see in the distance the semicircle of light that marks the exit. But when the path curves, when the tunnel bends, the end is not visible. You know it is there ahead, you know you will reach it, yet you cannot see it.
My creative search is exactly like that. I move forward, trying one transformation, then another. I adjust colours, textures, forms. I push the image in one direction, pull it back, try something else. And then something happens - not in my head, but here in my heart. Something matches my inside, my emotions. A resonance. I know I am on the right path. I continue, following that thread, until there is a moment when I go - yes, I got it. And I know I have arrived.
This moment, the eureka creative moment, is also of tremendous pleasure. It is great. It is sensual. It is almost orgasmic. The same release, the same satisfaction, the same sense of having found something that was hidden and is now revealed.
I did not always understand this connection. For years I thought of my engineering work and my artistic work as separate domains - the analytical and the creative, the logical and the emotional. But looking back now, I see that this separation was an illusion. In my doctoral thesis, written over forty years ago, I explored the difference between syntactic and semantic understanding - between recognising patterns on the surface and grasping the deeper structure underneath. The surface patterns are easy to see. The semantic depth is where the real work happens.
Problem solving in software requires exactly this: seeing past the surface patterns to the underlying structure of the problem. And artistic creation - at least the way I practise it - requires the same. I am not decorating the surface of an image. I am searching for its semantic core, for the emotional truth that lies beneath the pixels. The faculty I use is the same faculty. The search is the same search.
Why do these two activities appear to come from different worlds? Society likes its categories. Engineer or artist. Analytical or creative. Left brain or right brain. We are taught that these are different kinds of people, different kinds of thinking, different kinds of work. But my life is evidence that this is a false dichotomy. The dark tunnel does not care whether you are debugging code or transforming a photograph. The search does not respect disciplinary boundaries. The eureka moment feels the same whether you have found a race condition or a colour harmony.
Perhaps all creative work is problem solving. Perhaps all problem solving is creative work. The distinction collapses when you look closely enough. What remains is the search - the willingness to enter the dark tunnel without knowing where it leads, to trust that the light is there ahead even when you cannot see it, to keep moving until something clicks into place and the unknowns resolve themselves into clarity.
I have been fortunate to spend my life in this search, in both its forms. The pleasure of finding what was hidden - whether in code or in colour - never diminishes. If anything, it grows. Each eureka moment reminds me why I do this work, why I have always done this work, and why the apparent distance between my two passions was never really distance at all.
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