An Experiment in Scotch

So in my ongo­ing desire to lower my self-worth, I’m try­ing to learn to play the piano. Now, it’s not con­certed effort yet at all but I have some musi­cal abil­ity, I could play the piano once, and so I’m toy­ing with it off and on (mostly off). I men­tion this because I’ve had the thought before that James Tauber writes about, i.e. that pro­gram­ming and jazz have a lot of things in com­mon. It’s inter­est­ing to see the num­ber of other pro­gram­mers who are also musi­cians in their free time.

I think that one of the key con­cepts the two dis­ci­plines have in com­mon is the need to have an extremely solid bas­ing in the fun­da­men­tals before any higher order abil­ity becomes avail­able. In jazz, musi­cians spend count­less hours learn­ing scales, music the­ory and his­tory before they ever tran­scend to that next level of being able to cre­ate abstrac­tions from the music. It’s fun­da­men­tally the same in pro­gram­ming. I’ve been pro­gram­ming pro­fes­sion­ally for almost 8 years now and what both­ers me is how often it feels like the fun­da­men­tals change. I think that might be because, unlike in jazz, where scales and music the­ory don’t change every 2 years, pro­gram­ming plat­forms seem to. Some would argue that plat­forms aren’t fun­da­men­tal and to a cer­tain degree, that’s true. But when all your work is done on a given plat­form, it becomes the fun­da­men­tal. It’s hard to ever achieve a level of pro­fi­ciency when things change frequently.

Rob Walling writes that he fig­ures it’s taken him “hun­dreds of hours” to develop the blog­ging acu­men he cur­rently has. Hun­dreds of hours is exactly the kind of ded­i­ca­tion jazz musi­cians and top pro­gram­mers put in. Of course, when you put hun­dreds of hours into some­thing, you’re tak­ing those hours from some­where else. I think that’s my main prob­lem (but not point, I clearly don’t have one of those today), I have a hard time decid­ing that I want to spend hours on one thing over another thing.

I’m ready for the Matrix. Just plug me in.

In other news, SomaFM.com kicks ass. It’s great trance music and is awe­some to code to. Go check it out and donate some cash if you can spare it.