By Day I Build Technology

Most people who find this music assume I do it full time.

I don't correct them, exactly. But I've started to think it isn't quite honest to let the assumption sit there unspoken, because the other half is the more interesting half, and leaving it out makes this look like something it isn't.

By day, I work in technology. Systems, application, infrastructure, the fairly unglamorous business of making things function correctly for people who are relying on them and would rather not think about it. Meetings. Projects. Budgets. Roadmaps. A lot of decisions where the correct answer is the boring one.

It is not a placeholder. It's not the thing I'm enduring until the music works. I'm reasonably good at it and I find it genuinely interesting, which I think surprises people who want the story to be tidier than that.

What changes at night.

There's a specific hour where something switches, and it's later than most people would guess.

The day ends. The house goes quiet in the way houses do. And the problems I'm solving stop being anyone else's.

The felt piano comes out first. It always comes out first, before I've decided what I'm making or whether it's any good, because it's the closest thing I have to my own voice before I've chosen what to say with it. Everything after that is a response. The cello answers it. The erhu argues with it a little. The đàn bầu — one string, and it can bend that string until it sounds like something giving way — usually gets the last word, when there is one.

I don't plan those conversations. I find out what I think by listening to them happen.

Two different kinds of right

Here's the part I didn't expect.

The day job has made me a better composer. Not in any way that shows up in the music directly — nobody has ever heard a cello line and thought ah, infrastructure. But it taught me something about finishing.

In technology, "nearly working" is a synonym for broken. You don't get partial credit for a system that's almost correct. That discipline is unforgiving and I've carried it across: I've thrown out entire versions of songs that were nearly right, at hours when nearly right would have been so much easier to accept.

And the music has done something to the day job in return. It's made me more suspicious of solutions that are technically correct and feel wrong. That instinct is harder to defend in a meeting. It's also usually the one worth listening to.

One teaches me to build things that work. The other teaches me to build things that are true. I've stopped believing I'll eventually have to pick.

About the tools

Since I'm being honest about the shape of this: I make this music with modern tools, including AI ones, and then I finish every piece by hand and by ear.

I don't think that's a confession and I don't think it's a selling point. It's just what's true, and I'd rather you hear it from me than wonder. Created with technology, finished by hand — I mean both halves of that sentence equally.

The part no tool has ever done for me is know when something is finished. That decision has never once arrived on its own. It's always me, late, deciding to stop.

Why I'm telling you this

Because I suspect a lot of you are also two people in one day.

You have the version of yourself that shows up where you're expected, does it competently, and is not entirely who you are. And then some hour arrives — it might not be eight or ten at night, it might be five in the morning — where the other one gets to exist for a while.

I used to think of that as a problem to eventually resolve, by picking one. I now think it might just be what a whole person looks like from the inside.

"One teaches me to build things that work. The other teaches me to build things that are true. I've stopped believing I'll eventually have to pick."

If you've ever lived two versions of yourself in a single day, you understood this before I explained it.

Send this to someone else living a double life. Follow the story — @TheEchoMindFlow. Eight seasons, one at a time.