Making Music

I’m trying to get back into making music. It’s hard for me because I have no formal music education, and it feels like I don’t have permission to do this. So for now, I just sit down with my DAW (Bitwig) and MIDI keyboard (Arturia Minilab 3) and play without any goal, just getting familiar with the tools, going through presets. I don’t even save the results - I haven’t created anything I’d want to develop yet. I’m just lowering the barrier to entry and teaching myself that I don’t need anyone’s permission for this. I hope this will help me start actually creating something later.

What’s also important is that having physical keys, pads, and all these knobs helps me get absorbed in the process. It reminds me of how I loved playing with all sorts of dashboards with buttons as a child: a typewriter, a toy cash register, all kinds of imaginary dashboards.

Cinema

I consider myself a cinephile, but I’ve watched very few films in recent years - didn’t have the capacity. But now I’m reading Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation”, and the way he writes about films has helped me start watching them again.

This week I watched “The Last Picture Show” by Bogdanovich.

After two months of active searching (and three months without work, one of which I spent resting and reworking my resume), I got an offer finally. I learned a lot about myself during these months - about impostor syndrome, about how important it is to reflect on your experience and know how to package it properly, and about how much I actually know. I think I’ll write a separate post about the job search, but I want to note that it’s an exhausting endeavor, especially when you’re running out of money.

But I only got the offer on Thursday, and before that I had several very different interviews during the week: from a clear and interesting first interview with HR to a very sluggish and tedious interview with a CEO who couldn’t care less about wasting my time and his own (he spent the first 5 minutes of our meeting setting up his background in the video call software). He didn’t know what he wanted from this interview, and I wouldn’t have worked with him even if I hadn’t gotten the offer. If he doesn’t respect my time in an interview, what will happen when we start working together?

Next week I’m starting my new job, and it’s hybrid, meaning I’ll be going to the office. It’s exciting and scary.

Mentoring

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, learn to network, and also share my experience, so I signed up for the Mentor in Tech program. This week I had my first meetings with my mentees, and I was very worried about how they would go, whether I’d be able to help them since I’m doing this for the first time, but overall the meetings went well.

Interestingly, one mentee came with a request to work on impostor syndrome, but during our conversation we figured out that she doesn’t have impostor syndrome - she just needs help packaging her experience (which she does acknowledge) for the market.

I think that for a first meeting, reframing and clarifying the problem is a very good result.