I will finish my degree in creative writing next month. I've been working as a software engineer for almost 27 years now, but I have noticed that my ability to architect and write complex software has improved during the time I've been studying creative writing.

The skills necessary to build a complex novel—writing characters, scenes, plots, and pacing—seem to have translated quite well into building complex software applications. I never consciously applied my writing skills to my software development. I just recognized that I was going through the same mental processes for both one day, and that the quality of my software, and the speed at which I could write it, had improved.