One of the questions I’m oten asked on job interviewsis, “how did you go from getting a Ph.D. in music to being a software engineer?”
This post is an attempt to answer that question.
Obviously the glib answer would be: I needed to make more money to support my family. While that is true to some extent, it implies that I only write software for the money, which isn’t really the case. I love creating both music and software, and I would do both regardless of the resulting income. Writing software just happens to pay the bills more effectively. Furthermore, I strongly believe that having a fine arts background with an emphasis in technology is a great preparation for a career in software development. There’s a lot more to building quality software than understanding the syntax of a programming language. The links between music and software engineering are well documented, and I won’t delve into them here.
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I began programming at theage of 10 when I took a summer school class in BASIC, and I’ve been writing software ever since. In 5th grade I wrote programs to simulate baseball games and compute the statistical results of school surveys. In 6thgrade I wrote a program that generated crossword puzzles. I took FORTRAN in college, in one of the last classes at Indiana University to use punch cards. In the late 80’s, while working as a professional musician, I wrote a Hypercard stack to keep track of my band’s bookings. In 1989, when looking for a graduate schoolto attend, I sought out programs where I could combine my interests in music and software, and found the perfect match at UC San Diego. Here I took classes in Unix and C with F. RichardMoore, a former Bell Labs employee and author of Programmingin C with a bit of Unix as well as the classic Elementsof Computer Music. A research assistant position at UCSD’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts led to an appointment as assistant musicale at IRCAMin Paris. During my graduate studies, Dick Moore also introduced me to the NeXT computer and Objective-C, for which I’m eternally grateful. I spent many happy hours in the computer music lab writing C and NeXTSTEP programs, which led to a job in St. Paul Minnesota with a forward-thinking company called Integrity Solutions that happened to specialize in OpenStep application development. This led to a series of jobs related to that technology, which you can read about on my resume.
In other words, software has always been an important creative medium for me, on par with composing music or writing poetry.
Thanks for reading!