BACH TO
BASICS WITH
LOVELACE

As a musician, I had a lot of discipline when it came to practicing and preparing for performances. So that carried over to programming.

Also as a musician, you make mistakes a lot and have to learn to work through it and learn from it. In programming, you learn best by making mistakes, learning and getting better.

In music, my friends and I spent hours in the practice room and in rehearsal working over the same passages until it was solid. That idea of never leaving a problem until it is solved is needed in programming. It can be tempting to quit or do something easier. But sticking with it, helps you grow immensely.

The year was 2020 and there was a lot of discourse around race in America. This led to conversations about lack of diversity in many fields including the one I was in which was classical music.

I decided to learn how to code to build a site that celebrated black artists in the classical and jazz fields. There were games, artist profiles, and links to learning resources. I built that about 6 months after learning how to code.

Then about a year later, I created a version 2 of the site which included more games, profiles and a complete site redesign.

I started learning during the height of the learn to code movement which led to a lot of opportunity to connect with many developers and land my first freelancing gig.

Even though the learn to code movement has changed drastically, it is still worth it to build and show what you have in the community.

Another advantage to learning in public, was to engage in discussion and learn from others.

When learning anything new, there is going to be a period where you will struggle a lot and need to research and ask tons of questions. The same can be applied to music, cooking, learning to play a sport, etc.

It takes a while and tons of practice before you truly start understanding and becoming competent in coding. So my advice is to give yourself grace and commit to learning a little bit each day. Over time, your skills will become stronger.

The imposter syndrome might never go away, but you can always point to your skills and compare it with where you started.

This Dot Labs was my first full time developer job. And even though I was only there for about a year and a half, I learned and grew a lot during that time.

This Dot Labs was a consultancy which meant they were hired by companies to build sites and tooling. Some of the projects would last a couple of months while others would last a year or more.

When you bounce around between different projects and tech stacks, you learn pretty quickly how to read documentation, ask questions, and learn what the client wants.

I also got to learn from the tech leads and architects on how they approached problems and systems design. They had years of experience learning what worked and what didn’t. They also had confidence in making decisions and explaining why certain things were designed in a certain way. That was really valuable to me.

I wished I could have been more proactive and had more 1 on 1 chats with my coworkers. Everyone had unique backgrounds and wealth of knowledge to share. This Dot Labs was a remote company. So at times it was pretty easy to just work in silos and only virtually connect for meetings. I wished I would have reached out more for just casual chats about tech.

At first it was hard to start at the beginning or something foreign to me and know very little in programming. In my prior career, I had spent years mastering my craft before I became a professional. But with programming, I had only been learning for under 2 years before landing my first full time job.

It was a huge learning curve, but I just tried to take it day by day.

Well, the job was actually as an arranger and copyist. There was a whole department that worked on preparing scores and parts for studio sessions and my role was to help prepare the music for the musicians.

I guess if I had worked my connections, over time I could have worked my way into the Disney studios myself as a musician. But I had lived that world already as a freelance musician in LA and knew how hard it was to get studio work. I was fortunate to land independent studio work and a Netflix project but I knew it would take some time to crack into the Disney projects.

I ultimately decided not to take the arranger job and pursue programming because I was looking for a change.

The oboe is a very unique instrument and I love how lyrical and soothing it can sound at times. There are a lot of beautiful oboe solos in the orchestral literature.

I was fortunate enough to play in the orchestra for the 11th Annual NFL Honors. The music was fun to play and the celebrities in attendance were chill and nice.

I really love working with Astro. I have contributed to their docs a few times in the past and they have a great team and community.

I just find their framework easy to work with and enjoyable.