I am starting this blog to document parallel lessons between music and tech. I am a data engineer and code full-time but it wasn’t long ago that I was a Trombone Jazz Studies Bachelor’s of Music Performance student.
Many learners get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of learning to do when entering a new craft to study. There’s all these words; Hadoop, transposition, Hive, Harmonic substitution, SQL, half-whole diminished scales, etc. !!!!
How can I ever be a legitimate __fill_in_the_blank__ if I don’t understand even a handful of these skills to learn? It is daunting.
“It is better to get the whole thing of something small, than to approximate the thing of something big”
- Bill Evans
The advice that I always gave music students remains the same in tech.
Pick something easy and small
Ignore everything else until the small thing is done (this part is very important)
The way you keep your skills relevant throughout a changing landscape is to work on mastering the fundamentals. Practicing “boring” fundamentals gives you the freedom of adaptability. The reason is that fundamentals skills are the ones that are transferable to ever-changing bands, frameworks, gigs, technologies, etc
Fundamental Music skills
breathing, pitch, and time, etc.
e.g. I’m going to practice my major scales at a slow, 100 bpm speed
Fundamental Data Engineering skills
relational database queries, scripting of data pipelines, documentation, etc.
e.g. I’m going to write a Python script that grabs a CSV file, removes duplicate rows, and then moves it into a new location, zipped.
These bare bones skills aren’t clear for beginners. If you are a beginner in a craft, pick something basic to work on and the bare bones skills will become more apparent over time! Even being told what the fundamentals are, isn’t exactly helpful, because why/how fundamental skills exist in a craft matters more than what the fundamental skills are.
Breathe in, pick something small, and give yourself the grace to learn slowly.