My story
I have always loved music and I have always loved computers — and I can trace both passions back to early “core memories”.
Computers are cool
I fell in love with computers at the age of eight or so when a school friend’s mom taught me how to use DOS and helped me write my first program in QBasic. In hindsight, it was a really trivial program (a terminal-based directory / phonebook app), but that amazing feeling of putting words and symbols into a text editor, and that causing a computer to ask you questions and save the responses to disk? The feeling never went away. The feeling of bringing something to life just using a keyboard never left me. Since then I have always tinkered with computers — building PCs from components, building a home server, getting fed up with Windows and Mac and switching to Linux full-time, becoming a hobbyist web developer, and more.
Music is magic
I fell in love with music a little earlier than that. I don’t know how old I was exactly, but I would “help” my sister (ten years older than me) practice. This I would do by standing at the lower end of the piano, and playing certain bass notes when she told me to. I know now that I was almost certainly more a nuisance than a help, but those memories started a love affair with the piano and, later, the pipe organ. At one point in high school I really wanted to be a film composer, but my real joy was the piano.
Learning the organ because I'm lazy
I came to the organ much later — right at the end of high school. There is a small Anglican church just outside the campus of our high school. Their organist fell suddenly ill, and they were desperate for someone to fill in while he recovered — or until they found a permanent replacement. I had never touched an organ before that, but I told them I could play the electronic keyboard that lived at the back of the church. It was extremely heavy, though, and we (the rector and I) had to cart it from the back of the church every week. I eventually decided it would be easier to learn to play the organ, and so I gave myself one month to figure it out. I was only supposed to be there for a couple months, but I ended up staying there for more than three years.
Two careers, always a keyboard (or three)
With two passions centered around keyboards, it was eventually time to choose a career path. Ultimately, music won, and I went on to study music at universities and conservatories, and subsequently have a professional career as a pianist, organist, conductor, and educator. I have loved every minute of it.
After twenty years of professional music-making, I decided it was time for a change. For almost my entire working career my family and I had lived in the United States. We moved back to South Africa in early 2025, and I took that opportunity to make the change. I now work full-time as a software engineer, and am loving that, too. It is a bit strange not making music quite as much as I used to. But the upside is that it's now entirely on my terms.
Things I'm often asked
What programming languages do you know / use?
I started my development life in earnest with Javascript, and in many ways it's still my "first" language. I eventually added Typescript, and it's hard to imagine doing new projects without it. I've also done a fair bit of Python — mostly scripting and Django. At work we currently mostly use C#/.NET and Flutter, which I'm also quite comfortable with. I have an odd fascination with Java (I didn't do a CS degree so don't have the PTSD), but I don't have much opportunity to use it.
What do you think about AI?
Mixed feelings, but I kinda hate it, to be honest. I'm not against the idea of A(G)I, but I have a number of very serious reservations about how it's been developed and deployed in society. It has incredible potential to completely redefine the world, but I believe that a lot of the players behind it have been wreckless and have not kept the main thing the main thing — the betterment of society for everyone. So, while it is pretty remarkable, I have some major concerns about it.
What's so great about open source software?
How much time do you have? It is incredible and super important for a number of reasons. I am a big believer in digital sovereignty, and open source software is a key part of that. It allows users to have control over their own digital lives, rather than being at the mercy of large corporations. (Open-source software also powers most of the internet.) It also fosters innovation and collaboration, as developers from all over the world can contribute to and improve upon existing projects. Plus, it's also really cool to be able to see how things work under the hood; it's great for learning. But for me it's mostly about freedom — “free” as in beer and speech.
What are some of your favorite open source projects?
There are so many great ones, but at the top of the list must be Linux. I use Linux on my daily driver (personal) laptop. I currently use Debian, but Pop!_OS is also incredible, and I was using Arch (by the way) for a long time. All of the developer tooling I use is open source — ViM, VS Code, Git, etc. A lot of people don't realize that the internet is kinda run on open source software.
What music do you like / listen to?
I am a classical musician, so naturally I love classical music. But I am pretty electic both within classical music and in other genres. I love jazz, and in particular love the jazz piano greats like Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, and Keith Jarrett. I listen to a really wide variety of music, though, not least of all because I am in a house and family of musicians who all have different tastes.
Who are your favorite composers?
I'm quite eclectic, but I do have favorites, depending on the genre. As a pianist, it's Liszt, Beethoven, and Brahms. Liszt for unique combination of virtuosity, religiosity, drama, and the “profane”; Beethoven for the mastery of form and fusion of architecture with expression; and Brahms for the the breadth of intimacy to vibrant, youthful energy. As an organist, it's pretty much Bach, who is surely the greatest in the pantheon of greats, as well as the more colorful French masters, like Widor and Langlais.
Do you prefer the piano or the organ?
They are completely different instruments, and I will not choose. They don't really “compete” with each other, because they are — again — so very different. They are both very expressive instruments, but the kinds of things they express are quite almost on different ends of the spectrum. The piano has a much more immediate, direct expression. The way you touch the keys has a direct impact on the sound, and you can control every single note's shading and voicing. The organ (in my view) deals more with the “big picture” — it's huge and complex. Of course the organ can be intimate as well, but for me it's more about the contrasts and colors and orchestral sonorities than it is about the immediate, very human expression.
Chess
After a many-year hiatus, I have come back to chess. (This was mostly prompted by my son getting into it.) I am on lichess.org, and play almost every day now. I choose Lichess over chess.com because — you guessed it — Lichess is completely free and open source.