5 ms·

Being a Musician and Writer Fucking Sucks So I’m Going to Learn JavaScript

12 points by 6stringmerc 10y ago

vogt 10y ago
Good luck to you. I gave up on the dream of being a FT touring musician at 24 after a handful of part time college fail/drop outs to become a designer full time. I had studied it in high school (I went to a Vo-tech HS) and practiced a bit of web design to make a little money between college and playing in bands. I've been working as a designer / front end developer for 5 years now and my work has taken me from my hometown in New England to Texas(where I met my wife), Nevada, and now Washington. About as far from home as I could have ever imagined. It is indeed still a creative existence, but in a much different way. I don't play music at all in my free time anymore, but I now play a lot of D&D, write (currently working on a screenplay and a book), record a podcast, and have creatively fulling software side projects that touch on interests I like. Dog related, mostly. Most of all, money isn't an issue anymore. A low point in my life was on tour digging change out of vending machines to get tacos from jack in the box. That life is behind me now and a lot of the folks who looked down on me for selling out are pushing 30 and living on their parents couch still, feigning rockstardom.
Roboprog 10y ago
It's funny. I was thinking Friday how much I hate Java, and should have been a rock star :-) But you gotta keep on keepin on (about 30 years as a developer if I include part time work back in school days), and pay the bills for the kids :-( Good luck with those web page layouts and actions and such.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Java is lame. You should have co-invented USB, thats what a real rockstar would do https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=intel+rockstar https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=intel+rockstar
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    :-) Java is lame. There's actually a lot of things I like about Javascript better, but it's hard to get people to paradigm shift... And I really liked hanging out in the music department back in my college days (too many years ago).
Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
I had a job as principal bassoon in a symphony orchestra (80 musicians, so not a "full" orchestra with 4 in each wind group, but still decently sized). Tinnitus ruined that and I had to look for another job. I worked as a librarian in the royal music library in Denmark while studying CS. I did not end up doing what I wanted (Jesus Christ, I work in Pascal!) but I have a great job. I would throw it all out of the window to work with music again though. The core thing for me is that music is all about "spiritually" feeding yourself. Employers realise this, and give you time to do that. I find that for programming this is not the case. I have to struggle to keep my soulby continuously struggling to have fun side projects.
- tomcam 10y ago
  I love Pascal! But the tinnitus is a nightmare. Sorry you got it. What caused it? How do you cope with it? I know modern instruments are much louder than they were a few decades ago.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    I get the impression that most European shops dodged the C/C++ bullet. They seem to prefer sane Algol derivatives with bounds checking. Here in the US, instead of getting something like "Eiffel", we got "Java", after the insanity of connecting C++ to the internet was demonstrated. It's all cowboy country on this side of the pond :-) ... and yeah, hearing issues are much more serious than problematic programming languages.
kafkaesq 10y ago
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating JavaScript..." -- Allen Ginsburg

12 points by 6stringmerc 10y ago

vogt 10y ago

Good luck to you. I gave up on the dream of being a FT touring musician at 24 after a handful of part time college fail/drop outs to become a designer full time. I had studied it in high school (I went to a Vo-tech HS) and practiced a bit of web design to make a little money between college and playing in bands. I've been working as a designer / front end developer for 5 years now and my work has taken me from my hometown in New England to Texas(where I met my wife), Nevada, and now Washington. About as far from home as I could have ever imagined. It is indeed still a creative existence, but in a much different way. I don't play music at all in my free time anymore, but I now play a lot of D&D, write (currently working on a screenplay and a book), record a podcast, and have creatively fulling software side projects that touch on interests I like. Dog related, mostly. Most of all, money isn't an issue anymore. A low point in my life was on tour digging change out of vending machines to get tacos from jack in the box. That life is behind me now and a lot of the folks who looked down on me for selling out are pushing 30 and living on their parents couch still, feigning rockstardom.

Roboprog 10y ago

It's funny. I was thinking Friday how much I hate Java, and should have been a rock star :-) But you gotta keep on keepin on (about 30 years as a developer if I include part time work back in school days), and pay the bills for the kids :-( Good luck with those web page layouts and actions and such.

pawadu 10y ago
Java is lame. You should have co-invented USB, thats what a real rockstar would do https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=intel+rockstar https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=intel+rockstar
- Roboprog 10y ago
  :-) Java is lame. There's actually a lot of things I like about Javascript better, but it's hard to get people to paradigm shift... And I really liked hanging out in the music department back in my college days (too many years ago).

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago

I had a job as principal bassoon in a symphony orchestra (80 musicians, so not a "full" orchestra with 4 in each wind group, but still decently sized). Tinnitus ruined that and I had to look for another job. I worked as a librarian in the royal music library in Denmark while studying CS. I did not end up doing what I wanted (Jesus Christ, I work in Pascal!) but I have a great job. I would throw it all out of the window to work with music again though. The core thing for me is that music is all about "spiritually" feeding yourself. Employers realise this, and give you time to do that. I find that for programming this is not the case. I have to struggle to keep my soulby continuously struggling to have fun side projects.

tomcam 10y ago
I love Pascal! But the tinnitus is a nightmare. Sorry you got it. What caused it? How do you cope with it? I know modern instruments are much louder than they were a few decades ago.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  I get the impression that most European shops dodged the C/C++ bullet. They seem to prefer sane Algol derivatives with bounds checking. Here in the US, instead of getting something like "Eiffel", we got "Java", after the insanity of connecting C++ to the internet was demonstrated. It's all cowboy country on this side of the pond :-) ... and yeah, hearing issues are much more serious than problematic programming languages.

kafkaesq 10y ago

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating JavaScript..." -- Allen Ginsburg