{"id":6,"date":"2022-09-24T22:03:57","date_gmt":"2022-09-24T22:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/?p=6"},"modified":"2022-09-24T23:19:55","modified_gmt":"2022-09-24T23:19:55","slug":"piano-to-python","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/2022\/09\/24\/piano-to-python\/","title":{"rendered":"piano to python"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Where to begin! I was 6 years old when I started learning the piano. Over two decades later I’ve continued to play almost every day, earned a degree in music, and taught the joys of piano and music theory to others for 5 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the early years<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But something else happened a few years later in my childhood. When I was 11 years old my family replaced our E-machine\/Dell desktop computer with an iMac. Yes, this computer was shared by the entire family, a novel thought in this day and age. One day, I stumbled upon this funny little app called “terminal”. After feverishly hacking away on the command line (likely not entering any valid keywords and receiving only “hello: command not found” responses) I thought I had gained access to knowledge that is only revealed to a select few: the inner workings of how a computer performs magic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A few days later in school we were tasked with doing a write-up about where we saw ourselves as adults. I wrote about wanting to live in Seattle to escape my small town, listening to my latest generation iPod with all the music I could desire, and working as a computer programmer, even though I had no idea what that was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

college: round one<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward a number of years to my freshman year of college. I had taken a few music classes and a few math and computer science classes. I was faced with my first life-altering decision that so many of us face: which program of study is right for me? I felt equally connected to both and felt a split in my mind among the divide between the two disciplines. But after a few months of careful thought, I chose to pursue music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A number of years flashed by spent learning and teaching piano, writing\/producing music, and starting my own business, yet I felt something was missing. A dormant part of me that was still wishing I had uncovered more of the magic<\/em> that makes computers, programs, games, etc. work. I couldn’t get it off my mind, to the point where I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about all the possibilities and skills I could learn if I opened up the door to software engineering. I took some intro to Python courses through Coursera and applied to the OSU post-bacc a few weeks later, kicking off my current journey of school, which is now nearly finished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

complementary skills<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It took me a number of years to realize that my drive to create and uncover the magic<\/em> of what makes a system tick isn’t limited to only music and songwriting. I always thought I would have to make a choice along that binary: music or computer science. Moving through this program, working at my internship over the summer, and kicking off this new career has been really gratifying personally. I feel like I get to have a scoop of chocolate and vanilla ice cream after years of thinking I could only pick one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you remember those three things young Zach put on his list for how he sees himself as an adult, I can proudly say I’ve achieved each one: I studied music and lived in Seattle, went through numerous iPods (and graduated to Spotify when the time came), and landed my first job programming this past summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

capstone<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It’s a little surreal that this program is coming to an end, but I can’t wait to dive into this culminating Capstone course\/project. I’m really excited about the project and teammates I’ve found. Our project “Discover Daily” will extend the Spotify API to generate fresh playlists for users on a daily (rather than weekly) cadence. I’m excited to investigate a serverless approach and try our hand at deploying via the cloud, since I’ve been working with cloud performance on GCP\/Azure\/AWS at my internship this summer. After our first meeting I get the sense that we’re all hopeful that we can deploy a meaningful project that is more than just a local experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s to hoping we pull it off, and that I might discover a little magic<\/em> along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where to begin! I was 6 years old when I started learning the piano. Over two decades later I’ve continued to play almost every day, earned a degree in music, and taught the joys of piano and music theory to others for 5 years. the early years But something else happened a few years later […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/meyersz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}