🎹 My Move from Music to Software Development 🧑‍💻

Published:8 min read

I was ready to become a full-time musician in my younger years but decided against it - here’s why and how I made the switch into software development.

🥁 The Only Thing I Don’t Hate? Music

This was my response in high school when I was trying to decide what to go to university for. All other subjects were things that I didn’t really “get” intuitively and had to really work at (math, for example), or ones that didn’t excite me.

The main idea that drew me to music was (and still is) the ability to create something from nothing. This idea led me to eventually wanting to specialize in composition later in university when I realized it.

I’m a very creative person, so taking a blank canvas and expressing myself (in this case, through music) was something I think is incredible, and also extremely powerful both as an outlet and a way to make other people feel something.

So, I practiced hard, auditioned at a bunch of schools, got into them, and picked the one I liked the best. I was ready, full of dreams, and ready to start on the path to becoming a professional musician. Scary stuff.

🧑‍🎓 Bachelor’s Degree in Sick Beats

I learned a lot at university - but I always say that my greatest takeaway from the entire experience was “learning how to learn”, and not the actual knowledge that was presented to me.

I came to the conclusion that with the advent of the internet, pretty much all information you get from university is readily available at your fingertips with a search engine like Google (and nowadays, AI like ChatGPT or Bing).

In terms of “learning how to learn”, I’m specifically talking about the ability to parse through the information you can get your hands on and extract key/relevant data to what you’re trying to learn. Since there’s so much information out there, this ability is crucial in learning new things, and learning them quickly.

I graduated university after 4 long years of taking the bus both ways every day and was ready to take on the world - I had the knowledge and tools to start creating music that I hoped would get heard and make people feel something.

😩 Post Graduation and a Slow Realization

Unfortunately, to live in this world, you need something called…a job. A terrifying concept to a wannabe composer that would rather spend their days writing music that they think is cool.

During summer break in my third year at university, I was able to get employed at a music store full time until my next semester began. This was great because when I graduated it turned into a full-time role. Well, great for paying the bills, but not so great for pursuing my passion.

Slowly but surely, I realized something that I had kept pushing aside - it takes a lot of hard work to stand out as a composer. In creative projects (video games, film, television), there is almost always just a single composer. This makes it incredibly difficult to land a paid gig.

It’s not that I wasn’t willing to work hard, but the process relies on tons of networking, free work (just hammering day after day on creating new music to improve your craft), and to be honest - a lot of luck. I’m not saying that hard work won’t get you places, but there are many stories about people who have worked extremely hard, only to end up with nothing to show for it.

With these things in mind, I really thought about what my future would look like as a composer, and if it’s something I really wanted to dedicate my life to. Another question came into my mind while contemplating all of this - would I even enjoy writing music after making it my full-time job?

💭 Contemplating the Switch

With all of these thoughts swirling around in my head, I came to the conclusion that being a professional composer was not for me, and I’d rather keep music as a hobby I love versus a job that I have to do to survive.

But if not music, then what? As I stated at the beginning of this article, music was the only subject I didn’t “hate” in school. Well, there was one thing that I came back to time and time again - and that was programming.

From a very early age, computers and how they worked fascinated me. The idea of “commanding” the machine to perform tasks thousands of times faster than any one human could was intriguing to me.

Over the years, I probably tried to learn programming four or five times at various stages of my life, but stopped whenever it got “too hard” - but this time was going to be different. This time, I vowed to push through the difficulty and really make a go at learning it properly.

💻 Getting my Butt in Gear (Finally)

This is when I really started to get serious about making development my profession. I’m more of a structured learner, so I sought out courses that went step by step. I did a paid online web dev boot camp video course (around 100 hours), and then I completed one of my favorite “learn to program” resources: Full Stack Open.

Full Stack Open is something I still highly recommend to those that are looking for something a comprehensive overview of full stack web development. It filled in a lot of the gaps and missing pieces I had after completing the web dev boot camp I went through.

I also completed a lot of my own projects during this time, including some pretty cool CodePen web music experiments that I’m quite proud of. These projects were crucial to my learning, and to be honest not something that actually helped me land a job, but the experience I gained has definitely helped me keep my job.

📄 The Hunt

Speaking of - I had completed a few courses, has a bunch of projects under my belt, and was left with yet another question: When can I actually start looking for a job? It turns out that when you start asking that question, you can start applying.

Some rough statistics on my personal job hunt (this was at the start of 2020):

Honestly, it felt like a bit of a grind, but it seems extremely tame compared to the current market.

I landed a job with finnovate.io, a company which has treated me extremely well and feel very lucky to work at to this day.

👨‍💻 Look Mom, I Have a Career Now!

After landing the job, the real work began. It was a huge adjustment, and I had to put in a ton of effort just to keep my head above the water for the first little bit there. It’s definitely difficult to start a new career, especially one that you have no formal training for.

While it was tough, it was just as equally rewarding. Being able to solve real-world problems for people and improving lives through software is so gratifying, and I feel extremely grateful that it’s what I get to do for a living. Building cool stuff is great, but seeing the actual impact that the software you build has is even better.

🪞 Reflections on My Journey So Far

I’ve now been a professional software developer for just over 4 years. It’s been a great journey so far, and I look forward to continuing to pursue my passions while making cool stuff that helps people.

When people find out I moved from music to software development, they always say “oh wow, that’s quite the different career path!” And I always respond with, “well, not really…”

I explain that I got into music because I love to create something from nothing and was able to facilitate that through composition. Software development for me is really just a different outlet for that creative energy I love to channel. Creating is what I love to do, and it’s still kind of crazy to me that I get to do it as a career.

I don’t see myself moving away from software development anytime soon - perhaps ever. I feel lucky to have found my passion in life, and feel even luckier that it’s something that I can get paid to do every day.

If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read my music to development story! I hope you got something out of it. If you’d like to take a look at things I’ve made, you can check out my website here.

If you’re looking for a software development agency, you can check out the company I work for, finnovate.io. We help organizations of all sizes with digital solutions that fit any needs they may have.