Hey! I'm Ben. I grew up in the 80s in Seattle, logging onto bulletin boards with an inherited Cp/m machine, and started playing guitar and making music with machines at the same time. I started coding for work in the mid 90s after realizing I couldn't do social work in our shelter system here fulltime. What brings me here are a few areas of interest looking for community: - I've been tinkering with my music composition library Thuja for years. It's an expression of my mental model when I write music. Docs, explainer video and maybe some sort of visual programming or ux layer are on my to do list, but every time I go into composer mode with it, I end up adding or tweaking features. The repo is here https://github.com/benmca/thuja and has a workable readme and examples. I have been a fan of 100rabbits since i first heard about Orca and an enthusiast about and their site has me rethinking this mental model all the time. Ditto for Tidal Cycles. - I'm a big journaler and my website is where I keep some thoughts - mostly in the form of a daily sound, some text and a random shot from my phone on that day. After doing this for a few years - and 'purging' a lot of old keeper sketches from my archive onto this sound blog, I've got a feedback loop with myself that feels like a personal time machine and a self-censorship killer. Sometimes a post is a field recording, sometimes its a sketch, sometimes its a performance etc. Right now I'm thinking about how to do describe and apply this do->post->get distance->re-evaluate->re-do cycle to be a frictionless part of my programming flow and anywhere else I learn by doing. https://www.listenfaster.com/main/1min/ - A third topic is that I know I am not alone feeling deeply that programming and being a musician are intertwined in that they come from the same fundamental artistic impulse or thrust and it doesn't make me less of one to be the other. My artistic itch is scratched doing something technical without a sonic or artistic context. I juggle data pipelines between energy producers and sustainabiliy policy for my day job and sometime feel like a band leader and a composer, at least I'm using the same parts of my brain and skills. So I'm psyched to connect with other people who are sometimes seen as having feet in different camps. Hungry for more community 🙂 Also I thought the Esolang episode of the podcast was rad, and has me moving from lurking to introducer of self today 🙂 I'll read more on the slack here and get an idea of where to put a discussion, but any pointers to previous relevant threads are appreciated.

What a fascinating backstory! Thank you for sharing this, and I'm glad you're here. If you haven't seen it, we have a bit of (long-winded, sorry) guidance about what the different channels are for on our website.

Thanks!

As a computer engineer who did a masters program in Music Technology, I definitely feel you on the resonance between computing and music