I feel like for a lot of us, at its most basic level, software development is truly creative. It's not the activity that people traditionally associate with the term "creative outlet" but for me at least it's akin to combining human emotional experience and music theory to compose a song or a flavor inspiration and the 12 tastes in food to create a dish. Even further as I've moved into a Machine Learning Engineer role the creative aspect needn't even be sensual, like visual or auditory, it could be totally abstract: I find the concept of some of the tensorflow graphs I have created to be beautiful even though they are way too complex to visualize (suck it tensorboard).