Notes

Before software, I spent two decades immersed in music. Not just performing it, but studying it as a system: structure, hierarchy, timing, pattern, tension and release, communication without instructions. Music taught me how complex systems can remain elegant, expressive, and understandable. Software turned out to be another language for exploring the same ideas.

At Berklee, I gravitated toward the musicians who modified software, built strange workflows, and couldn't resist taking things apart. Around MIT, I found the same people again- the creative and artistic programmers, engineers, makers, and hackers. Different disciplines, same curiosity. Those were my people. They still are.

Decades of experience in education taught me that if users are confused, the design is unfinished.

Music taught me to think in systems long before I wrote software. Harmony, rhythm, orchestration, signal flow, acoustics, perception — music is a study of structure unfolding through time. The more deeply I studied it, the more I became interested in the systems underneath.

Berklee and MIT were very different places, but the people I connected with most were remarkably similar: curious, creative tinkerers who treated systems as something to be explored rather than accepted. Those were my people. They still are.