My New Job

Two weeks ago I started a new job as a Technical Program Manager at Amazon Music, after sadly having been part of the COVID-19 layoffs at Rover.com back in the end of March.

The collision of music and tech has been a recurring theme for me for decades now, going all the way back to my teenage years when I was teaching myself Microsoft BASIC on my dad’s IBM PC by writing a simple music sequencer.

With the perspective of a few decades, I can look back on my adult life squinting, just a little, and see that this new gig is another chapter in that story I started writing for myself when I was about twelve: Take music … and software … and smash them together to see out what comes out.

It’s exciting to find myself in the supercollider again, still smashing particles of software together in a charged field of music, and looking for order in the creations that spiral out of those collisions. No doubt some of the fallout will be predictable or even mundane, but taking experience as a guide I’m pretty confident I’m going to find novel particles here and there, and maybe even an occasional hint at deeper meaning.

Also for the first time in 18 years, I’m working again at the same company as my friend Brent Simmons who I first met at UserLand Software around the turn of the last milennium. We started our new jobs on the same day if you can believe it, after having both found ourselves without jobs within a just day of each other because of the pandemic.

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