← Blog
How I Taught Myself How to Code

How I Taught Myself How to Code

careermusicengineeringpersonalself-taught

I did not enjoy coding when I first encountered it in school. I was full set on being a musician. I’d taught myself guitar the same way I taught myself everything that ever stuck. picking it up off-hours, chasing the parts that interested me, ignoring the rest.

Years later, I found myself working support at a startup, spotting automation opportunities in my own workflow, and realizing the same self-taught instincts that built my music chops were quietly turning me into an engineer.

I spent years making music before I ever wrote a line of code I actually cared about. Ableton Live was my IDE, audio samples were my data structures, and mixing was my performance optimization.

People treat these as completely different worlds. They’re not.

The Overlap Nobody Talks About

Iteration is everything. In music production, you lay down a rough take, then refine it. Add layers, adjust levels, cut what doesn’t serve the track. Software is the same loop. prototype, refine, ship, iterate. The first version is never the final version, and that’s fine.

You have to know when to stop. Every producer has a track they’ve been “almost finishing” for six months. Every engineer has a feature they keep polishing instead of shipping. The skill isn’t making something perfect. it’s recognizing when it’s good enough to release.

Collaboration requires ego management. In a studio, you learn fast that defending your idea too hard kills the creative process. In a code review, same thing. The best output comes from people who can separate their identity from their work.

What Music Taught Me About Craft

There’s a concept in music called “ear training”. developing the ability to hear subtle differences in pitch, timing, and tone that most people would miss. It takes years of deliberate practice.

Engineering has its equivalent. Over time, you develop an instinct for code smells, architectural patterns, and performance characteristics. You start feeling when something is off before you can articulate why. That intuition isn’t magic. it’s pattern recognition built through thousands of hours of practice.

Music also taught me that fundamentals matter more than tools. I’ve seen producers make incredible tracks on basic equipment, and terrible tracks on $50K setups. Same in engineering. A developer who deeply understands data structures, algorithms, and system design will outperform someone who only knows the latest framework.

The Transition

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a coder. It was gradual. Working support at a startup, I started spending off-hours automating parts of my own job. scripting repetitive lookups, batch-processing exports, stitching together small tools that took the boring work off my plate.

Then I realized I was spending more time on the tools than the tickets. And enjoying it more.

That instinct wasn’t new. It was the same one that had me sitting on my bedroom floor figuring out chord shapes from YouTube clips, or pulling apart sample packs to learn how a track was put together. Self-taught guitar. Self-taught producer. Self-taught engineer. The medium changed; the method didn’t.

The scary part wasn’t learning to code. It was telling people I was no longer “a musician.” Identity is weird like that. But here’s what I’ve learned: you don’t stop being one thing when you become another. The musician in me makes me a better engineer. The attention to detail, the obsession with craft, the ability to sit with a problem until it clicks.

What I’d Tell Musicians Considering Tech

  1. You already think in systems. Signal chains, MIDI routing, audio buses. that’s systems thinking. You just haven’t called it that yet.

  2. Your ear for quality transfers. The instinct that tells you a mix sounds wrong is the same instinct that’ll tell you an architecture feels wrong.

  3. Start building tools for yourself. Don’t learn to code in the abstract. Automate something you actually do. The motivation sticks because the problem is real.

  4. Don’t apologize for your background. Non-traditional paths produce non-traditional thinking. That’s a feature, not a bug.

The best engineers I know came from somewhere unexpected. Music, architecture, biology, cooking. They bring patterns and metaphors that computer science majors never would.

That’s not a disadvantage. That’s a superpower.