
Being a Musician and Writer Fucking Sucks So I’m Going to Learn JavaScript - 6stringmerc
https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/being-a-musician-writer-fucking-sucks-so-im-going-to-learn-javascript-8e02ed2cf382#.ouru49ol0
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vogt
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.

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Johnny_Brahms
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
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
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.

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Roboprog
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
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
:-)

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).

------
kafkaesq
_" 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

