What I Listen To While Coding

It’s Friday morning, time for a more light hearted blog entry. Plus, it’s been ages since I’ve blogged anything except conference related things. :) Several folks lately have been discussing what they listen to while coding, I thought I’d jump into the fun.

I’ve got pretty diverse taste in music and enjoy most genres at least to some degree. While writing code, it’s usually the following:

For easier tasks, more mindless bug fixes, etc, it can be pretty much anything. So whatever pops into my head is what I’ll play. Lately that’s been 90’s emo/post hardcore (Sunny Day Real Estate, Texas Is The Reason, etc) or 80’s things — The Cure, The Jesus and Mary Chain and so on.  (Occasionally I’ll listen to podcasts of various sorts too.)

If the work requires a lot of focus (and lately that’s been the case) I stick to more ambient or instrumental music from various genres. Old jazz records (Wes Montgomery, Chet Baker, Herbie Hancock) or Brian Eno albums are pretty common. YouTube has some great Sigur Ros ambient recordings that are over 6 hours long — these work great for me. Also good are slightly more up tempo (yet still instrumental) electronic bands such as VCMG or MG (both are Depeche Mode side projects), Tycho, Kraftwerk and the like.

One of our main projects these days involves a lot of video recording (more on that later). Alas, that means no music at all some days. That gets balanced out with music at the gym or while walking the dogs. :)

Happy Friday!
-nolan