“With a kick, snare, kicks and high hat, skilled in the trade of that old boom bap”

Before I was a software engineer, I was a music producer. Specifically, I made beats for rap songs. Then file sharing put a dent in the music industry, and it became much harder to do as a career. But hey, I had programming to fall back on!

I still made music as a hobby over the years, but less and less seriously as time went on. Very recently, I got news that Akai was discontinuing its iconic offering of standalone hardware MPC drum machines. This made me deeply sad. I mowed untold numbers of lawns for my first MPC and it felt to me like the death of an era.