Thanks for the very positive comments. Always glad to hear from another musician/developer. Congrats on graduating and keep practicing (code and music). I’ll keep an eye on your blog.

Matt (@mattroman)

On a personal level, I really liked this post that you made. I’m both a programmer (I recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a CS degree) and a musician, and I’ve strongly felt a link between my musical and ‘programming’ side. For me, the mindset that I use while programming is similar (if not exactly) the same mindset I use while composing music. As you mentioned, a lot of programming involves laying down foundation, structure (i.e. “building a bridge”) — same thing in music, where you have to create song structure, maintain (or break!) tonality, create driving melodies, etc. Also, the conscious decision of sparseness or denseness in instrumentation/music is parallel to the same notion of cluttered/uncluttered code — however, with the key difference that density in music can be (in certain scenarios) extremely moving, whereas density (as in cluttered) in a code base is unpleasant

Incidentally, I’ve recently been developing my website (which has a WordPress blog), where I’ll be talking mainly about CS, music, and teaching. I happened on here by Googling “simplicity in music, coding” (which will be the topic of my next post, I’ll be sure to link here!), and this was the 2nd hit.

Thanks, take care!
- Eric