I love synths, although I have to admit I understand little about them and music in general. But since I was a kid I was surrounded by very old electrical devices, instruments, keyboards and synths. There was something about the playfulness and forgiving aspect of a synth that I always found amusing.

Imagine being a kid and instead of being told off for touching buttons of a shiny machine, the machine would reward you with fun and weird sounds because of touching everything. Kids dream.

It looked something like this, but I was very young I can’t really remember which model it was.

I never thought much of this. It always felt like a vague memory of ‘yeah I played a few times with a synth’.

But looking back into my career in software, and the moments when I have most joy while writing code, I realize the influence of these early experiences (and some others from the houses I grew up).

The hours spent in front of that synth, playing with the dials and just being at owe of the sounds that would come out of it.

It was imperfect, non judgmental, yeah some sounds are weird and hard to use in real life but they are valid, you could find a place for many of them. But most importantly as a kid it felt magical, there was no sense of this is stuck or not working.

Fast forward a few decades, some life has passed and I became a bit of a perfectionist, also a pragmatic and realistic Engineer, that commits to actual outcomes and deliverables. No complains here it has brought to me a great and comfortable life. But I’m missing the experimental and playful aspect of those early days. I’ve tried a few approaches along the years but still feeling that void and lack of playful experimentation.

No wonder why I’m attracted to folks like Bret Victor or TodePond or the work at Dynamicland.

A recent talk (Jul 15th, 2024 - On sharing the journey) sort of made these things click. Seeing the approach folks are taking at tldraw to build their startup got me wondering. What would it look like to combine the demanding outcome-driven work of my day job with feeling experimental and joyful along the way.

So here it goes, a new attempt at building software like a kid playing with a synth. Sharing random snippets, treating all of them like quirky random sounds coming out of that old synth. Maybe many of them are not great but the combination of all those sounds hopefully will paint the nice lil melodies that our final products are.