Is writing code really that different to making music?

Recently I went through a massive career shift from working in dimly lit ‘vibey’ studios to record and produce music to working in ‘open and airy’ offices to write code and create software.

When I talk about this shift with my music friends the first thing they say is: “I could never code, my brain isn’t wired like that!”. My developer friends say the opposite: “Why would you leave something cool like music to do something uncool like code?!”

Well, is writing code really that different from producing music and is it really that uncool?

Not really, give me a minute and I’ll explain.

In music production / audio engineering we talk about signal flow.

Imagine a recording studio: cables coiled on the ground, A big fancy looking mic and a nice vocal booth. It’s easy to take for granted that everything will work, but behind the scenes a chain of events happens:

The singer sings into a mic, that signal goes into a mixing desk, the mixing desk wires it through some effects to make it sound big and shiny, then that modified signal gets sent into the computer. Now that it’s in the computer, it gets re-routed through the music software before finally getting spit back into the mixing desk, and out through the speakers so we can hear another song about a break up.

Here’s a (kind of) pretty diagram:

On the other hand, software development is about data flow.

A user opens up a website, when it loads it displays a login page, the user types in their information and a piece of code stores that information temporarily. Then, when the user clicks the sign in button that info gets sent to an API, the API passes it on to the database where it gets saved to be retrieved for the next time the user logs on.

Well hold on a minute, both things are about creating a route for some form of…

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