Becoming A Programmer: My Uncensored Story
Sometimes, life has a way to knock at your door and sweep you off your feet. In my case, one of these key moments happened in 2016, at the age of 35 years old, when I found myself standing at the crossroad between discovering a new passion and almost losing my life due to my extreme lifestyle.
I’d been a musician for as long as could remember and I never questioned the fact that music was my purpose here on Earth.
But about 3 years ago, everything changed.
I’m grateful every day that I found the courage and will power to embrace the unknown and pull myself out of this hole I dug myself in.
It was definitely one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
The very beginning Of The Story
A Little Bit Of Background…
I used to be the exact stereotype of the person who my mom used to describe as the artist type. Sensitive and emotional, I had a tendency to describe myself as “not very rational” or “overruled by her emotions”.
At the time, my definition of “being a rational person” meant to be someone grounded in a day-to-day routine. I knew that this was not me.
I was a musician and a nomad, living day by day and travelling where the music would take me, following my instincts and emotions rather than taking down-to-earth decisions (yes, I know how that sounds…).
Little did I know that there was much more to it than my distorted understanding of the concept of rationality. My definitions about myself and the World, in general, were all over the place and highly influenced by the only reality I knew since I left my home town to start my nomadic journey at the age of 22.
I consider I was successful as an artist in an original kind of way, travelling and discovering new places, people and cultures, sometimes struggling to eat, sometimes sleeping in 5-star hotels. The diversity, strangeness and instability of my life mixed with the chance of playing good music with great musicians (and also a lot of times playing s****y music with s**t heads just for the money…) kept it alive and interesting for me for nearly 20 years. From playing on street corners in Canada to playing at Wembley stadium I lived the extremes and everything in between.
Overall, I have to say it was pretty awesome. All of it, the good, the bad and the ugly.
But through it all, something was missing.
Hitting Rock Bottom
I had this sinking feeling that somehow, this wasn’t enough: the people, the travels, the stages, the shows, the fans, the music, the musicians, the media, the “music business”…
This feeling of emptiness kept creeping up inside me even in the moments where things should've been perfect, when people around were telling me how lucky I was to live this kind of life.
People who unfortunately were bored with their jobs or who never had the chance to live their dreams and were living them through me. Or other musicians taking me as an example that something different can be done.
But somehow I wasn't happy and I couldn't understand why.
I sank into drugs and depression and worked myself to a burn out over 3 years while living in India.
I would often work in recording studios for 24 to 36 hours straight. I’d take the plane and travel around the country, often for meaningless but well-paid gigs, one, two, sometimes three times a week. I tried to build my own record and event management company, which ended up failing miserably because of my lack of experience and judgement on the business partners I chose.
My health started to seriously deteriorate.
Because of the drugs, the hectic hours and the lack of sleep, I lost my appetite and became unable to eat for weeks on end. I drove myself to the point of starvation where every piece of food I tried to force myself to eat would bring excruciating pain. My digestive system collapsed.
The first time I had a severe attack, I was extremely lucky to be hosting a friend from Australia. I managed to crawl to her room at dawn before falling almost unconscious after struggling for hours with agonizing pain in my stomach. She had the presence of mind to call a friend living nearby who came to my rescue, carried me in his arms down the stairs, put me in a rickshaw and brought me to a hospital.
There, a nurse immediately gave me some kind of sedative trough intravenous to ease the pain and I passed out from exhaustion. I woke up a few hours later only to find myself bathing in a pool of my own blood because the nurse didn’t do her job right and had missed the vein.
My Australian friend, who was sleeping on a chair next to me, woke up when she heard me whimper. When she saw the blood, she started screaming and ran out of the room to fetch a doctor or a nurse. People came, lifted me from the bed, cleaned up the mess and inserted the intravenous once again, correctly this time.
Somehow I made it out of there about 5 or 6 hours later.
The doctor and nurses tried to keep me but I didn’t want to stay. They tried to give me medicines which I refused to take.
I didn’t trust anyone anymore.
And I didn’t want to acknowledge that something was wrong.
And I was bored. Without realizing it, I was holding on to my unhealthy behaviours because they made me feel alive. I was trapped in this fictive character of “superwoman gypsy musician” which I had created and now couldn’t live up to.
For 3 years, I drove myself to a point of intense misery.
Until one day, after a hard break up with yet another band and yet another man, something inside me finally broke enough that taking a decision towards change was not only a question of will power, it became essential to my survival.
I left India and returned to my family home in Portugal.
I needed time to recover and I needed to find my purpose again.
When I arrived at my parent’s house, I felt broken. But I had the beginning of an idea and a little bit of will power left to try something new.
Hello, technology?
The idea I had was simple:
I wanted to integrate the power of technology into my work and stop relying on people to play music with me.
I was disillusioned by people and felt like I needed a break from humanity. I was trapped in a catch 22 where finding a stable band of musicians to put a long term project together became difficult because of all the travelling and moving around. On the other hand, I knew what it was to play as a solo artist alone on stage with my instrument but that idea didn’t excite me enough anymore. I wanted to sound like a band while depending only on myself.
Asking help from technology seemed like a scary but potentially interesting option.
Most musicians who are “noobs” on the subject of technology start out exploring with effect pedals and loops. So I did just that and went ahead and bought my first loop station (a BOSS RC-505 to be precise) as if that was the answer to Life, Creation, and God itself (42! 42! 42!…).
And in a weird kind of way, for me, it was.
Realizing That Technology Was My Friend
In my first musical jams with my loop station, I instantly fell in love.
I thought it would be something complicated to learn, that I would have to go through a phase of frustration before having fun with my new tool and I was a little bit afraid of that phase. I was afraid to feel that “this wasn’t for me after all” even though I desperately wanted to make technology my friend for practical and survival reasons.
But that’s not what happened at all.
I unpacked it, plugged a microphone in and fell in love.
I had so much fun and the feeling of freedom was amazing! I could do anything and I didn’t need anyone else.
That’s when it first hit me:
“Who was this amazing person (or group of people) that created such a machine?!?! “
I’d never thought of that.
But I felt such a burst of love for my new toy that I just wanted to write to the company (in this case, Boss) and tell them to hug their engineers for me, that they changed my life (yes, I know, it must sound so funny!).
I realized at that point that there is some kind of World we, as musicians, never really have access to. There are people creating the machines (engineers and the likes) and people using the machines (us, artists or hobbyists) and these two worlds rarely meet.
Discovering Computer Programming
Computer, Who Are You?
My curiosity about how machines (like my loop station) were made and who were the amazing people behind them grew steadily over the next weeks.
Until one day, I got hit by lightning.
I realized there was a machine with me ALL THE TIME, which I used ALL THE TIME… and I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how it was made or how it actually worked.
That machine was, well, probably you guessed it, my computer.
All of a sudden, I found myself asking “Who are you and where do you come from?” to my laptop. It was enough to fire up an intense curiosity in me.
But I was so clueless…
When you really, really don’t have a clue about something (and I mean really no clue…) it’s even hard to Google stuff because you don’t even know what to type in the search box (yes, that’s how bad it was…). I couldn’t find a place to start. It was the first time in my life that I actually regretted not having paid much attention in school.
One thing I “knew” was that I heard a lot of people talking about “hackers” and “hacking” on the internet and on the news. I wasn’t great at keeping up with the news but I did somehow keep up enough to hear these words thrown around now and again back and forth in the media. I started to be naively curious about who actually were these hackers and what exactly is hacking.
So I began by using hacking as a starting point keyword for my google searches and it went something like this (I’m a bit embarrassed so please don’t be too hard on me on this one…):
“What is hacking?”
“Famous hackers”
“How to hack”
etc …
Probably you can imagine that, at first, I stumbled upon a lot of not-so-great content. On the other hand, I was miles away from understanding the content that did seem of value because of the technical terms they contained.
So I focused on stories and documentaries. I watched a lot of talks and conferences trying to slowly understand a little more about the “cyber” world and the people who had influenced it. I binged watched DefCon conferences on YouTube.
I was at a point where I was looking for something more in my life. In fact, I was looking for a way to contribute to society beyond working in the entertainment industry, looking for something where I felt I could add value and have a positive impact on the World around me.
Baby Steps Towards Coding
Slowly slowly, day after day, my curiosity grew and I started to be able to kind of filter out the good information from the rest until, one day, yet another post on “how to become a hacker” mentioned something that caught my eye.
I don’t exactly remember what the post was or who wrote it but basically, what it said went something like this:
“If you are truly interested in learning about hacking, you should learn at least one computer programming language. There are many free resources on the internet to learn how to code but I strongly recommend checking out the CS50 course on EdX to get you started.”
Wow… learning a programming language… That is one thing that never in my life I thought I would have the interest, or the ability, of doing. Remember when I was saying that “rational things” were not for me…
Still, the post said “if you are serious…” and yes, I was serious.
I wanted to learn, I wanted to find out where this passion would take me though I still didn’t have a clue what I would end up doing with it.
With all this racing through my mind and even though the idea felt completely absurd, I took a deep breath, went ahead and clicked on the link provided in the article and enrolled in my first online computer science and programming course.
Computers Speak A Language, Just Like Humans!
Right after joining the course, I started watching the first lecture. I was immediately hooked by the way Professor David J. Malan explained the material. Professor Malan is a FANTASTIC educator. He talks about computer science with passion and in a clear and accessible way, even for people that have absolutely no background in computer science what so ever.
But then, not even halfway through the first lecture, something just clicked. It happened when professor Malan moved on to the topic of converting decimal numbers to binary.
Before this first lecture, I never understood what “binary” meant.
I knew it’s about 1s and 0s and that, apparently, that’s what computers and machines understand but the idea that all the information around us was understood and processed by computers using binary was something that was completely beyond me.
I just couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible.
David Malan’s explanation gave me a sense of what that meant for the first time. The mystery of how a computer “communicates” slowly started to unveil.
That’s when I realized that programming languages are just that, a language.
Because of all my travels and my diverse origins, I’m able to speak four different human languages fluently and can manage my way with a few more.
Learning a language is something I knew I could do.
All of a sudden, the idea of learning a programming language became accessible to me because I could relate it to something I was already confident I had abilities in.
Learning How To Code (Or Developing A Superpower)
From that day onwards, I dove deep into a process of self-learning and discipline.
I learned about using Linux and working from the command line. I learned the basics of C, Python and Javascript. I learned about networking, TCP/IP and how the internet works and I started on the path of doing a self-paced computer science degree by following the OSSU curriculum.
I even discovered how to integrate my passion for coding with my musical skills by learning Ruby and using Sonic Pi.
Coding felt like a superpower (it’s still the sentence I have at the top of my terminal window).
It made me feel like I could build anything. Things that people could use, things that could make a difference. I just needed to have the knowledge to do it.
And learning was under my control. I just needed to put in the time and the dedication.
The internet was full of information for me to tap into. So many people took the time to answer questions, write tutorials, put together online courses… Everything was there and I felt like a sponge who just wanted to absorb all the information I could put my hands on.
My head was overflowing with questions and excitement. I literally discovered new muscles in my brain and it felt so amazingly good!
“Coding is a superpower” - My current terminal
In Conclusion…
At the time when all this happened, I was recovering from a burnout. My health was in pretty bad shape so I was taking time out in my family home to recover.
It could’ve been a really difficult phase but it turned out to be a blessing.
I was so lucky to have the time to learn while being surrounded by my family who was incredibly encouraging and supportive. They also didn’t know where all this would go but they saw me grow and trusted that wherever I’d end up, it would be somewhere good.
For that, there are no words to express how grateful I am.
After almost a year of teaching myself through online resources from the isolation of my bedroom, I realized that I wanted to pursue a professional career as a programmer.
Since then, I never stopped learning. At the moment of writing this, I successfully completed the Founders And Coders Bootcamp and been working as a coding mentor for already almost 2 years. I found that teaching is a great way to solidify the knowledge I’ve accumulated since all this first started.
I managed to put all the pieces together from my work as an artist and my passion for technology in a way that makes sense to me. Every day, I wake up excited for one more day of doing what I love… and that’s the best feeling ever.
Do you also have a career change story? Or did you discover a new passion recently? Feel free to share some of your experiences in the comment section below ⬇️.
Thank you for reading! ❤️
Are you curious to hear how your code sounds like?
Programming is not only useful to build applications, it’s also a powerful means of expression. When I started programming, I never thought I would one day merge both my passion for music and my passion for technology together.