Tag: software

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This is part of a series getting to know the people in the MusiCoders Slack group who are both professional musicians and professional software engineers.

Photo credit: Nancy Morla

What is your current programming and musical life?

→ I’ll start a front-end bootcamp next week. Aiming at cybersecurity once I have enough web dev experience.
→ I was a studio musician on occasion before the pandemic. Nowadays I’m a music reviewer, curator and marketer at a record label, and I play my instruments in my free time.

What is your primary instrument and what age did you start learning it? Did you study any other instruments, either as a child or an adult?

→ Viola. I started at 16, but had been playing the violin since I was 9.
→ I started taking piano lessons at 17 and kept at it throughout my college years.

What was your experience of learning a musical instrument, and how did it differ from your experience in learning to program?→ My learning process for musical instruments wasn’t that self-aware in the beginning. The meta-cognition required to make practice sessions more efficient started developing at about 17, but only consolidated during my college years. At that time, I learned things like:

• Documenting and tracking my progress.

• Working in sync with my body and mind, and not against them (best times of the day to practice, the importance of rest, mental practice etc.)

• Approaching challenges/errors as a laboratory of problem solving instead of mindless repetition

That very meta-cognition was a game-changer when I started learning to program. Making progress tangible is a great way to cope with frustration. Things feel difficult, but doable.

How old were you when you started programming? Why did you start programming?

→ I was 26 and really interested in electronic/algorithmic composition. So I chose to do my master’s degree in those fields. There was a natural need for automation in them, so I learned languages like Pure Data, LISP, and SuperCollider.

Do you have any specialisms in your musical performance?

→ Not really. I was an orchestral musician back in the day, but I decided to focus more on composition.

Do you have any specialisms in your programming?

→ I’m still a beginner in web dev, so I haven’t specialized on anything yet. A lot of focus on JavaScript right now, though.

Do you hold degrees in music, computer science, or something else?

→ Bachelor’s in both viola performance and composition. Master’s in composition.

What influence, if any, does your musical background have on your programming, and vice versa?

→ Playing in ensembles and orchestras gave me team skills that I’ll probably make good use of as a professional programmer.
→ Things like discipline, patience, and tolerance to frustration are inevitable parts of a musician’s life. They’re transferable to any career, but programming needs lots of them.
→ Algorithmic composition has a good balance of creativity and logical thinking. In a way, I was already thinking like a programmer before learning any languages. But programming really helped me develop my own style as a composer.

Aside from music and software, what other hobbies or pursuits do you have?

→ Foreign languages
→ Salsa dancing

What would you say to a musician considering a career change into programming?

→ If you’ve developed the mental toughness to become a professional musician, you already have a lot of what it takes to be a programmer.
→ Your brain is probably more trained to think like a programmer than you realize.

And finally, what advice would you give your younger self when you started programming?

→ Don’t freak out so much about the math part. Everything can be re-learned through the meta-cognition tools you developed as a musician.
→ Don’t wait so much to take the leap. You’ll never be “100% ready”.
→ Find a community as soon as you can.

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This is part of a series getting to know the people in the MusiCoders Slack group who are both professional musicians and professional software engineers.

What is your current programming and musical life?

I think of my working life as a 50/50 split between tech and music. I clearly can’t do as much as a full-timer in either field but I find dividing my time interesting and refreshing.

I work for Platform.sh as a staff engineer, designing and writing web API services, scripts and tools (in Go and PHP). The company originated in France but it allowed remote working from the beginning, and has developers all around the world.

I’m also the second violinist in the Ligeti Quartet (since 2010) and I do some freelance work in and around London – mostly chamber music, orchestras and sessions.

What is your primary instrument and what age did you start learning it? Did you study any other instruments, either as a child or an adult?

I learned violin and piano from the age of 7, and violin took over at university.

What was your experience of learning a musical instrument, and how did it differ from your experience in learning to program?

Learning music was very structured. In music you often go to a 1-1 tutor every week from an early age – imagine if you had that for programming! Maybe people do these days. I learned code by writing it and looking things up every step of the way, first via books and later via Google.

How old were you when you started programming? Why did you start programming?

My dad taught science and computing in my school. So I started probably around 8, first doing silly things in BASIC, and then a bit later making websites in HTML and a bit of C or Perl, and later PHP. Many tables were involved. It was a hobby until late in my degree when I started doing it for money too.

Do you have any specialisms in your musical performance?

Contemporary string quartet music. The “contemporary” part is not a genre, it usually just means the composer is still alive, and rehearsals are often a collaboration or at least a discussion. “String quartet” is also not a genre but it does seem to be a particularly complex and rewarding occupation. I studied a bit of Baroque violin and I love that music but it hasn’t featured in my professional career.

Do you have any specialisms in your programming?

Backend web development. Mostly this involves designing and writing API servers and clients. I currently work in Go, PHP, a little bit of Python, a tiny bit of JavaScript, and plenty of shell scripts. Like any developer I enjoy new, greenfield projects but I have done a lot of work on preserving backwards compatibility for “legacy” APIs and tools.

Do you hold degrees in music, computer science, or something else?

An undergrad degree in Music followed by two years at a conservatoire.

What influence, if any, does your musical background have on your programming, and vice versa?

Musical work is often really independent, and I like to think that makes me a more self-directed programmer than I might be otherwise. I’m comfortable with not being able to understand something, and with learning by doing. In the other direction, I think the business and project management ideas I’ve learned from tech are quite helpful in music – what to do and what not to do. And it really helps in both fields to know how to use a spreadsheet.

Aside from music and software, what other hobbies or pursuits do you have?

I have a toddler and that’s plenty for now.

What would you say to a musician considering a career change into programming?

I still do both, so I might not be the best person to ask. I think getting into open source can help; it means you can learn how to collaborate with other developers before you even have a job, and those collaborative “soft skills” are the most important ones.

Both of my careers can be wonderful and really hard on different days. But the killer feature of the tech industry is the potential for ultra-flexible remote work.

And finally, what advice would you give your younger self when you started programming?

Slow down – take a little bit more time to design and research first, and write tests, and leave the code a bit later. But also, feel freer to venture into technologies you’re unfamiliar with, it never takes as long to learn as you think.

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Image by Niek Verlaan from Pixabay

You’re a junior developer, you have your first tech test, and you want to impress the potential employer. Here’s how.

README
This is the first thing I look at. Your README should have:
– the specs (what the problem is you’re trying to solve)
– instructions to run the code (assume I will clone the repo – then what should I do?)
– any explanations you want to give for why you did things
– further refinements / features you would add given more time

Git Usage
While there have been other version control systems, git is industry standard now and I’d expect to see it on any tech test.

.gitignore
Even if it’s blank (and it won’t be if you are using npm packages or an IDE), it shows you’ve thought about what needs to be committed to a git repo and what doesn’t.

Commit History
This is a more controversial one, as looking at my own history, I see the occasional gem such as “3312: make code less manky”, and I’d hate for people to think every commit message has to be a work of art. However, a good commit history can show your thought process and your collaborative skills – what happens when you win the lottery and I have to take over your project? First thing I do is look at the commit history as a summary of what you’ve done and how you approached the project.

Code Analysis
I want to understand how you’ve thought about the code. In particular, I want to see:
– code coverage (SimpleCov for Ruby, for JavaScript use Jest’s built-in –coverage flag or Istanbul/nyc)
– linter (Rubocop for Ruby, eslint for JavaScript)

Testing
The first part of the code I look at is your tests. Poor test coverage is an immediate cause for rejection. In addition to 95% or higher line coverage (there is a law of diminishing returns so don’t worry about getting it to 100%), I also want to see:
– boundary test cases: if you’re working with numbers, have you tested one above and one below your highest/lowest number? Or if working with text, have you considered whitespace before and after the word/characters?
– error handling: particularly in dynamically typed languages such as JavaScript and Ruby, what happens if the calling code gives the wrong type of input, or no input, or too much input? E.g., if you have a function to multiply two numbers, what if one of the inputs is a string? (Side note, this is why I prefer statically typed languages, which specify a type and will fail to compile if the type is wrong!)

And finally, do yourself a favour and learn TDD. It will solve most of your test and code problems. Kent Beck’s book is a great place to start – it’s in Java, but you can translate as you go to the object-oriented language of your choice.

Code
The last thing I look at is for your code. And the first thing I look at is whether you follow Sandi Metz’s Rules for Developers. While they might not always be relevant in production, real-life code (although they often are!), there’s generally no reason that in the artificial environment of a tech test you can’t follow these rules. And in fact, you should also apply these rules to your test code.

Then, when I’m looking at your code, I’m thinking, “If there is a bug in this code on Friday at 4pm, will I be able to understand clearly what’s going on or will I be tearing my hear out?” In other words, does it communicate its intention clearly? Code does this by:
– short methods that do one thing only
– methods and variables that are named according to what they do (if you have a method that is called getResponseFromServerAndComputeFunction, that method is too long and doing too many things)

Immediate Rejection List
The following will guarantee you an immediate rejection from a lot of reviewers, myself included:
– no README. We are busy and don’t want to use a crystal ball to figure out what we’re supposed to do
– no tests or poor test coverage
– not using git or all code in a single commit

And finally, I want to clarify that this is my personal list, heavily informed by my training at Makers, coding best practices, and my experience as a professional developer. Not everyone will have this same list and I also try to approach each candidate with an understanding of their individual circumstances.

Good luck and let me know what you think in the comments!

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If you’re a musician turned coder, you will doubtless be thinking about how to get that first developer job. Networking in the developer world is very different to classical music networking, so here’s a quick introduction to relationship-building (aka networking) in the software industry.

  1. Rock Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is HUGELY important — I got my 2nd developer job because I had a good LinkedIn presence and a recruiter I really liked reached out to me (shout out to Alex, if you’re reading this!). So here’s what you should do:

a) Look at these examples of career changers’ LinkedIn profiles

– Paula Muldoon
– Jaycee Cheong
– Howard Reith
– Peter Dodds

b) Add the following to your LinkedIn profile:
– picture (can use one of your musician headshots, although potentially without an instrument if you’re just starting out)
– make a headline (example: “International musician turned coder”)
– “About” section. This is your chance to tell your story about why you learned to code and what skills your previous life as a musician you can transfer.

2. Go to meetups/virtual conferences
Developers love to get together and chat after work. Go to meetup.com, find a meetup that’s relevant to you, join, and start chatting! Ruby meetups generally are beginner-friendly. Software Crafters is a good one as well. And lots of conferences are not only online right now, but you can watch conference talks from previous years any time for free. Not sure where to start? Try Brighton Ruby — they have Ruby-specific talks as well as general programming ones, they’re a friendly group, and the speakers are AWESOME. Check out Katrina Owen’s Cultivating Instinct talk. And oh yea, she’s a musician too.

3. Add people on LinkedIn
Your goal is to get to the magical number of 500 connections, at which point your profile says 500+ connections and you look like somebody that people want to know.

a) Add everyone from MusiCoders that you’ve interacted with
b) Add everyone from your software bootcamp, including teachers
c) Add everyone you interact with at software meetups
d) Add conference speakers whose talks you like, usually with a message “Hey, I saw your talk ____ and I really liked it because of ____.” They will probably accept, and if they don’t, it really doesn’t matter.

4. Rock your Twitter profile

Twitter is where the dev world socialises. And also posts jobs. We don’t use Facebook (I know, it’s weird). The good news is rocking your Twitter is less work than your LinkedIn profile. And while I haven’t yet found a job via Twitter, I have gotten an expenses-paid speaking engagement in Madrid. (Which is less exciting for us touring musicians, I know, but is a great think to put on a developer CV.)
a) Open a Twitter profile
b) Follow me (@FiddlersCode) and look at the devs I follow and follow them (at some point I’ll try to write a list of who to follow)
c) Follow the MusiCoders devs (especially @MathiasVerraes)
d) Follow #CodeNewbie

5. MusiCoders

This is your tribe — the people you have SO MUCH in common with. Join the #careers channel, and ask for support, advice, and introductions.

Not sure what MusiCoders is? Find out here.

Thanks for reading, and good luck job hunting!

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Whenever I’m stuck on a coding problem, my instinct is to turn to my (senior developer) partner, gesture at the screen, flail at the keyboard and say, ‘Make it work!’

Needless to say, this approach (and yes, I have tried it), does not work.

Knowing how to ask for programming help is a really tricky skill for beginners. For us musicians, we are used to individual lessons where a teacher knows us and our context very well. These teachers often tell us what we need help with and don’t leave space for us to self-direct.

So here’s a basic template (adapt as needed with experience) that you can use to ask for help.

What language and version are you using?

Where/how are you trying to run this code? (E.g. in the browser console, the command line, an interactive shell)

Which operating system (macOS, Windows, Linux) or browser if you’re running it in the browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc) are you using?

What is the context? (E.g. this is a single function or it’s the final stage in a complex web app request or it’s an automated test.)

What is the expected output?

What is the actual output?

What have you tried so far to fix it? (It really helps to keep a record of this. I use a bullet journal.)

What is the critical thing you are trying to do? (E.g. select a random number, receive a 200 status response.)

Which method(s) is/are you using to achieve this thing?

Send code snippets / screenshots!

Send code snippets / screenshots!
Send code snippets / screenshots!

Quite often by the time you have answered all these questions, you will have solved the problem. Not all of it will be relevant to your specific problem but it’s good to know anyway! And if you haven’t solved your problem, this gives someone else really useful information to help you.

Got other questions to include? Let me know in the comments!

JavaScript edition:
Have you forgotten to include a return statement?