My wife and I were talking recently about how we feel like we’re floating in a constantly numbing “Groundhog Day” fugue state. Instrument building is a super effective way to change my entire frame of mind, much like getting deep into an improvisation or track editing session. So while it’s not anywhere closely related to my day job, my unconscious probably doesn’t see it that way. Regardless, it serves to dissipate the stress all around me.

Plenty of people who work in technology are musicians. Plenty of humans are musicians, and all of us are listening, even those who cannot hear. In my travels through datacenters and software, I have come across musicians like myself who have not only done double-duty with their computer science and creative lives but also relate and interweave them. If they’re like me, they cannot break them apart. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of us. We all have different stories, came into the worlds…

It’s dead simple. Focus on your team and product.

Probably around five years ago now, while much further in the depths of a thrice-laid-off financial hole the technology industry bestowed upon me, I became fixated with actually building my own electronic instruments. Ensuing the expertise to make music that way, I departed into the wide unknown universe of DIY audio.

Someone showed me this incredibly awesome looking ‘DIY’ pedal being done by Line6 called the ToneCore DSP Developer’s Kit. At first I think, aaah what a cool platform for custom DSP pedal effects, what a nice little generic pedal with cool ways of creating my own DSP configurations… you can imagine the excitement, so unfortunately diffused by this paragraph: