As a coder and a musician, do you notice any similarities between the two? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

The things I like most about music often don’t intersect that much with code, in that music is about feelings and emotions, and software is about facts and dataflows. But there are at least a few things that are similar:

* Great musicians and great software engineers both come from a place of initial interest plus a whole lot of practice! There’s really no way around putting in the hours to get good at what you do.

* Whether it’s music or software, it’s hard to get in so many hours honing your craft without having some sort of deep enjoyment for the work, and so you’ll see practitioners of both doing a lot without actually being paid for it. In software we call it Open Source, and in music it’s a Jam Session.

* The reward for all that hard work for both software engineers and musicians is often a personal sense of success more so than a public one. When you finally master some tricky software technique like monads, or when you finally master some tricky musical technique like circular breathing, the world doesn’t really stand up and applaud. But you know you’re awesome.

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