Chris Carlson is a Berklee College of Music graduate with a Major in Professional Music. His principal instrument is drums. After graduating, he taught music and gigged in the Seattle area. In 2012, he moved to Nashville for two years and decided to move back to Seattle. In 2015, he started programming and signed up for a coding bootcamp after feeling burnt out from trying to have a career in music.
Chris says of his career shift, “A lot of the musicians I do know who are also engineers made a shift like I did from having no technical background to going through a bootcamp and getting a job. I think that trajectory is really challenging because you go from knowing nothing to just drinking from the firehouse. I went from knowing nothing to getting my first job in about a year.”
Chris is currently a Software Engineer II at Microsoft. Before Microsoft, he was a full stack developer at Robert Half Technology and was a web developer for Rational Interaction.
How did you get into music and how did this lead into pursuing computer programming?
This is a long story. My dad is a musician, guitar player and singer songwriter, so I was raised around music. My grandfather on my mom’s side was a swing piano player. I come from a family of musicians. My sister is also musical. I always remember my dad playing and having music playing in the house. He played a lot of seventies music like Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers. I started getting interested in drums around the fifth grade. We had a family friend who was a percussionist. I remember going over to their house and being fascinated with all of the percussion instruments. There were a lot of Brazilian and African instruments and they started teaching me world rhythms. At the time, my family and I lived in Montana so I didn’t have a drum set. Getting a drum set wasn’t feasible because the only place I could have had one would have been in the garage and the winters in Montana are pretty insane. It gets down to negative forty at night. It wasn’t really an option.
My dad’s a graphic designer and had a job working for Quest at the time based in Seattle. That is what brought us to the Pacific Northwest. I was really bummed about having to move and leave all my friends. My parents made a deal with me. When we moved, I could get a drum set. I was twelve and in the sixth grade and that is when I started playing the drum set. I took to it right away and at this point I wasn’t interested in coding at all. The coding thing came much later. I was always around computers because my dad was a graphic designer. I learned how to use them at a pretty young age. Working on a computer wasn’t something that was foreign to me. I went through high school being very passionate about music. I participated in all the bands in school as well as outside of school. When I was seventeen, I started playing in clubs. I joined a band of Seattle musicians that were all a lot older than me. I played around Seattle, California, Oregon, and Idaho.
After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I graduated in the spring of 2009. I had the intention of moving to LA because I was born outside of Los Angeles and I have family down there. I figured I needed to move to New York, LA, or Nashville to try and make it. LA seemed like the most logical choice. I had a plan with a few friends and we were all going to move to LA. I came back to Seattle for the summer and I didn’t feel like I wanted to live in LA. My heart was not in it. There’s smog, traffic, and I like to have seasons. The plan fell apart with my friends. I was gigging and teaching in Seattle so I decided to stay in Seattle. In early 2010, I met my wife. That was a pretty important life event. We married in 2011. In 2012, I was in a place where I was feeling pretty unsatisfied. I was teaching and playing locally.
My wife, who is also a graphic designer, just finished school. We decided pretty quickly to move to Nashville for a while. I had been there before and my wife was there once. We liked it so we moved to Nashville in 2012. We were in Nashville for two years and we realized it wasn’t for us. I moved back to Seattle and fell back into musically doing the same things. I was feeling very burnt out on music and trying to have a career in music.
Around this time, a friend of mine who played guitar had gone through a coding bootcamp. I thought it was really interesting and this was back in early 2015 before bootcamps were all over the place. I would hang out with him and ask him questions about what he was learning and how he got into it. I also had a few other musician friends who were also developers. They told me to try it out to see if I like it so I started taking free tutorials online. I started with basic web development tutorials learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I learned how the three technologies talk to each other and work together. I really liked it and I started making basic websites. I was pretty into it and taught myself for six months or so. After that, I saw myself being very happy with a career in web development. At the end of 2015, I went through a twelve-week bootcamp. It was called a Web Development Immersive. They have since changed the name. It is called a Software Engineering Immersive. In early 2016, I was looking for my first job. I got my first job in May of 2016. I have been working as a developer ever since.
Are there similarities between drumming rhythms and the flow and rhythms involved in programming?
I do think it uses similar parts of the brain. Drumming is math as you are dividing time. I think that very analytical part of the brain is used when you have to code, solve problems, and build new things. I was really drawn to the creative aspect early on as a developer. One of the things that I built early on that I am trying to rebuild is to make a more modern gig tracker. It allows you to track the gigs you’ve played if you are a hired gun. That’s pretty much what I am. If you play in a bunch of different bands, you can put in your gig data and at the end of the year you can see how much you made with each band, where you played with each band, and how many states you played in. It’s really cool because I had an idea about this and I can make it a reality. It is the same thing with music. You are able to flex that creative muscle.
The other thing I think is that when you are a musician and you are playing a lot of gigs, you really learn how to work with other people. It comes naturally to a lot of musicians. You may show up to a gig and not know anyone and you have to make it work. I have done a lot of wedding gigs and wedding gigs have rosters of musicians. I will show up and know it’s going to be a five-piece band, but I have not played with anybody in the band before. You just show up and make it work. I think one of the biggest strengths is to be able to work with people and have a good attitude about things. This has helped me get way further than just being able to learn a new technology.
Can you talk about your current role at Microsoft?
My official title is Software Engineer II. Their roles start with Software Engineer, then Software Engineer II, then Senior Engineer, and then Principal. I am in somewhat of a transition because the team that I am on, we are under a new organization within Microsoft. We are taking over many new projects. For the last few years, I have been working on the Azure marketing website. It is the website that basically tells customers what Azure does, the cost of it, and how you can migrate your existing workloads. I worked on that and now we are migrating that entire website to a CMS, content manager system, that Microsoft owns so they don’t need a huge engineering team.
At one point my team consisted of more than thirty engineers. We had a really big team with tons of project managers and designers. It became this massive thing and I think Microsoft wanted to simplify it and not spend so much money on the website even though Azure is probably one of their highest grossing products. My team has been moved over to this new organization. We are still working on the Azure website and we just do work on it that is absolutely required. They aren’t doing any updates as it is in maintenance mode.
Microsoft has all of these different websites. They have the Xbox website, Microsoft website, and Office 360 website. All of these websites consume a service that pulls in a universal header and footer. So, if you go to any of these websites you will see that they have the same header and footer. They are configurable per site. This is one of the new things that I am going to be working on. It is called Universal Header Footer. It’s the service that makes everything work. There are a couple other smaller websites that I will be taking over. I am still doing a lot of front-end work, but it will become full stack as we move into the new work.
What is a typical work day like for you?
My days are pretty much the same. I work from home one hundred percent now which started with the pandemic. Since the pandemic, my team has hired engineers that are spread out all across the U.S. Right now, we have an engineer in Chicago, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, one in New York, and my boss is in the Seattle area. I am also in the Seattle area. It doesn’t really make sense for us to go in but my boss says I can go in if I want. Since we are all scattered, it makes sense to work from home. It has been great and I love working from home. I have been working remotely since 2018.
I wake up really early as I have two little kids. I will start my work day around eight or eight thirty in the morning. I spend my first half hour going through emails and Microsoft Teams. We use Microsoft Teams as our messaging app. I have Standup at nine every day. It is a very short fifteen-minute meeting where all the engineers go around and talk about what was worked on the day before and what you are going to work on today. We were working in two-week sprints, but I think that will change with the new work. I think it is going to be even longer. It may go to two and half weeks to three weeks. A sprint is a set of planned work that takes two to three weeks. We work in two-to-three-week sprints.
After Standup, I have two to three other meetings that vary from touching base to features that I am working on to general Microsoft meetings on how the company and organization is doing. With the time in between meetings, I work on whatever feature is in the sprint or bugs that need to be fixed. I usually sign off around four thirty in the afternoon. I also do code reviews. We were using GitHub for a really long time but now we are moving over to DevOps because that is Microsoft’s version of GitHub even though they own GitHub. I don’t know why we just don’t use GitHub as I love it so much.
Do you still have time to play the drums and pursue music?
I think I have kept a pretty healthy balance. I think it was pretty healthy before Covid. Obviously, Covid hurt a lot of stuff. I think my busiest gigging year was 2018. I was working as a fulltime engineer and playing gigs. I have managed to stay really busy. I started having kids in 2020, so that has added a whole new thing. I have a two-year-old and a four-month-old. It makes it a little bit harder but I have been playing. It’s starting to slow down with the holidays coming up.
For someone interested in learning about web development, how do you recommend they proceed?
When I started, I used Codecademy. There used to be these awesome free tutorials. There were basic tutorials in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. They had a build a web page tutorial where you combine the three. It was so eye opening to go through these four things. There are so many resources now especially compared to when I was doing it seven years ago. I would check out YouTube, Udemy, and google basic web development or JavaScript tutorials. There are a lot of great resources and I would start with those three languages. Aside from the basic web technologies there are many JavaScript frameworks and libraries that are used like React which is really popular. They constantly change. I would just focus on the basics: JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. If you want to do front end or full stack development, JavaScript is probably the best language to learn and know. It is the language of the web. There is a lot of paid content that is not too expensive.
A lot of the musicians I do know who are also engineers made a shift like I did from having no technical background to going through a bootcamp and getting a job. I think that trajectory is really challenging because you go from knowing nothing to just drinking from the firehouse. I went from knowing nothing to getting my first job in about a year. It prepares you for being in the hot seat and having a lot of stuff thrown at you which is good when you are joining a new team or getting a new development job. Every team has their own stack, own way of doing things, own way of testing, and own way of documentation. It is good prep for the real world.
What else do you want to accomplish?
In the coding realm I still feel like such a new programmer. I have been doing this for seven years now and I can’t believe it has been this long. There is always new stuff to learn. In terms of my personal career goals and the corporate ladder, I am trying to figure out what I need to improve upon to get up to the next level. With Microsoft it is a little strange as there are two levels within Software Engineer II. I am on the lower level in Software Engineering II. I am trying to get up to the next level and trying to figure out how to do that and what areas I need to improve upon. As far as how high up I want to go, I don’t really know that yet. I don’t know if I would want to do what my boss does. He is a Principal. There is so much planning and you are in meetings and you don’t code as much. I am still thinking everything over.
For music, I have a goal to hopefully build a studio. I was going to build one at my house two years ago. I have always had a goal to get a studio together to start doing remote tracking. I put together my own band and I do write my own music. It is like Jazz but it’s not straight-ahead Jazz. It’s instrumental music. It has been a long time since I have gigged with that band. I want to book more gigs and maybe one day record my own record as I don’t have my own original music out there. These are two of my music goals.
