On Leaving Traces As A Programmer

I’ve been listening to CityPop 80s music since 2017, a genre which sprung from another genre (Vaporwave) sampling mostly old 80s music from Japan, and lately I’ve been digging around what an artist made beside their main works. This stems because I got bored listening to the same songs over and over again, which is understandable since most of the artist from that era are not active anymore, taking a different career, or work in another band. I kind of want to hear something similar but not the ‘popular ones’.

If for example Toshiki Kadomatsu’s jumpy groovy bassline is a staple for you, then you’d enjoy Jadoes’s Free Drink. I did also find Tomoko Aran’s More Relax is definitely a Casiopea’s album with vocal in disguise.

This gets me thinking, even when a particular artist is producing works for other person, you could still see or hear their identifiable characteristics on their works, and this is pretty apparent in music fields.

In other fields like game art, George Kamitani’s works on Vanillaware stand out like a sore thumb, that man is responsible for some of the finest artwork in the industry. Even on game producing, Tetsuya Nomura’s fingerprints are all over the place for some Final Fantasy games, or even the auteur Hideo Kojima, someone who experienced his games would easily put his works as Kojima’s designed games.

Which gets me thinking, is there something similar in that vein with programming works? Do people will eventually know if a program is built by a particular person given the final product? The general commentary of the masses when evaluating a game product is usually along the lines of “Wow this game art is really good” or “This is a well designed games because how easy it is and yaddda yadda yadda”, it’s never “Wow this game is technically perfect!” coming out from a general masses, it usually a commentary from a fellow developer / programmer.

The proverb A fisherman can recognize another fisherman from afar are in play on this. Strangely when a games is bad, crash too much, have a lot of bugs and technical difficulties, it is the first thing that the general masses would react negatively on the technical aspect.

Are we as a programmer doomed to not have any identifiable traces in our works?