Over the past year, a lot of my time has been spent in various IDEs like XCode and Visual Studio 19 working away at audio plugin code.
In all honesty, if you asked me at the start of the year whether I would enjoy coding and software development I probably would've said no. Yeah, I've always been interested in more "tech-y" elements of creativity. I love learning about how things run in the background. I guess it goes with the Sound Engineer goal. What I hate, however, are fiddly and frustrating tasks. I find hardware and the frustrations that come with that area of expertise extremely frustrating. There's so many different elements that can go wrong and a plethora of different ways you have to troubleshoot them.
So I guess it's not that fact that they're complicated/fiddly that I dislike, more the amount of unknowns. Luckily, coding isn't really like that (at least from what I've experienced so far). You have your coding language and various preset modules. You have Projucer and your Native IDE. And that's about it. If your code doesn't work, it's because you don't know the right code. No blown resistors or dodgy soldering. It's all there for you and when you crack it, it provides an immense satisfaction that areas like hardware never gave me. Kinda like a digital puzzle I guess.
Overall though, the plugin suite development has been going well. I've really loved working with my partner in Studio Nani (the cheesy name we gave for our development "studio") Ethan Punter. Honestly, it's probably the smoothest group work I've ever done. We're excited to show off the plugins later in the year at Exposure. Will feel so good when they're all finished!
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