From age ten my sole goal in life was to be a professional Jazz drummer. I’m not exaggerating. ‘Jazz Drummer’ was effectively my conjoined twin, forcible separation was not possible without certain death. 

This modus vivendi, while intense, served me well through my teenage years and early twenties. I won some awards, performed around Australia with some of my heroes, and moved from my home town of Sydney, Australia to New York City.

My summer of discontent

I had just finished schlepping my drums all the way from Harlem to the West Village and back. It was a hot and sticky July evening and I should have known that the empty subway carriage that I picked on the way home was uninhabited for a reason, no AC. After finally making it through the front door of our rented, over priced, (mercifully ground floor) apartment, I sat on the couch clutching the fruits of the evenings proceedings, a crumpled 20 dollar bill in tips.

I liked computers and once looked at the code for a MySpace theme. That was my only claim to any ‘programming’ expertise, yet something made me whip out my credit card and pay for a 3 month programming bootcamp.

Victory through redefinition

Programming is unnatural. In a good way. What other discipline gives you the same satisfaction as the carpenter or stone mason but unburdens you from almost all constraints of the physical world?. It seems to me the only real limits are one’s ability to reason.

I’m convinced that there is no greater parallel to learning how to play an instrument than learning how to code. Any accomplished musician will tell you that to truly learn something you must allow the implicit process of repetition and muscle memory to dove tail with theoretical understanding.

Programming stole my attention not only because it allowed me to “put food on my family” - GWB. It unlocked my ability to truly think.

My conjoined twin, Jazz Dummer is still here, but it has become more abstract. It’s the part of myself that gains satisfaction from constant learning, creativity, building, and performance. Admittedly coding has a different weighting to playing the drums in a club, but all the aspects are there and just as real.