From opera to tech / Jordan Eldredge
People are often curious to hear how I went from a background/degree in classical music to a career in software. So, I thought it would be worth while to write down my full story. This post is a series of anecdotes capturing what, in retrospect, feel like the key events that allowed me to go from an arts education to a sustainable software career. It ends with some reflections on what I think made it possible.
One quick aside before I begin: this is just my story. The industry has changed dramatically over the intervening years, so I would caution against reading this as a playbook that could be expected to yield similar results today.
As a high school student I was involved in a local theater company’s opera-centric children’s program. As a result, I became interested in opera. I sang leading roles in student productions, chorus roles in local professional productions and loved listening to recordings of operas.
Living in the nascent age of digital music, I started to acquire a large number of digital opera recordings. Pretty soon the issue of how to organize them on my computer became a pressing concern for me. The existing solutions were all based around iD3 tags, which were woefully inadequate for cataloging all the singers, conductors, composer, chorus, venues, etc. that made these recordings so fascinating to me.
