I sing, play guitar, bass, and saxophone, as well as enough drums and keyboards to get by in rock or pop settings. With my current group we've started to use a

I sing, play guitar, bass, and saxophone, as well as enough drums and keyboards to get by in rock or pop settings. With my current group we've started to use a heavy dosage of Max/MSP for audio and Quartz Composer for visuals... my professional programming experience really helps with creating really good interfaces for the software (not just UI, programmatic interfaces as well), so extending or modifying the software happens at a pace that keeps up with the rest of the band... and being that music is prety much realtime... If you're interested, we've got some demos up... http://redblueyellow.com http://redblueyellow.com Of course I did our website as well... Rails ;) And how many bands have a github account? Sorry, no public repos yet... http://github.com/redblueyellow http://github.com/redblueyellow At one point we had three software developers in the band, but we've slimmed down due to gasp, guys getting jobs in the industry elsewhere (other than SF, I know, right?) and now I'm the lone coder. I'd say I'm about 50/50 when it comes to music... I've had periods where I did it full-time, and I've had periods where I've coded full-time. Right now I'm burning the candle at both ends with a contract job and spending at least 30 hours a week on the band. I know quite a few professional programmers who are also professional or semi-pro/very dedicated musicians. I think there is more to it than mere correlation. And can I say that the 10,000 hour thing is WAY WAY off? I'll put it in musical terms: I started playing the saxophone in 5th grade. I played for 2 years. I switched to guitar. About 4 years ago I picked up a sax because the band I was in needed some horns. After about a week, I was 100 times better than I ever was before. So what happened? Well, I learned more about music in the mean time. I'm sure I could pick up any instrument much, much quicker than someone who has never played any instruments. What am I getting at? Well, a lot of things in life have more than just a passing similarity. They have core fundamentals that are shared. I am completely convinced that this applies to music and software development, although I have no idea why.