Ten years ago, I was collaborating with Dangdut Academy stars and people from Bandung’s big nasyid scene, even though I couldn’t play an instrument. I still can’t. At college, the previous team trusted me enough to put me in charge of the music club. I initially refused, but they insisted. The role was handed to me before I understood why anyone thought I belonged there.
Years later, software did the same thing. I found myself leading products used by many people before I had decided I was qualified to lead anything.
Across both crafts, other people trusted me before I trusted myself. Their confidence opened the rooms; it never taught me how to feel at home inside them.
The first door opened when I was sixteen. I was supposed to be preparing for a math exam; instead, I was fucking around with a pirated copy of FL Studio. I made a ballad for a nasyid project in a few minutes. Before I had time to ask whether I was worthy of making it, the song was already carrying me toward people I never expected to meet.
Inside those rooms, I couldn’t perform alongside the musicians. What I could do was listen. When someone handed me recorded material, I carefully cleaned the audio, tidied every MIDI note almost religiously, and gave each instrument room to shine. I adjusted the tempo until the piece began to breathe. Tempo became my instrument; production gave my listening somewhere to go.
Looking back, perhaps that was what people trusted me with: the ability to listen to the whole and help its parts move together. Years later, product work gave that instinct another form. I could listen to people, notice when parts of the work pulled against each other, and help shape them into something people could use.
None of this began with technical readiness. I was thrust into production—the live software people were already using—without knowing a single line of SQL or how a server worked. There was no technical senior to call and no hidden competence waiting to appear. I had to figure my own shit out. I made bad decisions. I was a bad leader. Whatever I learned, I learned while already responsible.
I still get stage fright. I still make mistakes. Responsibility never waited for me to feel ready, and becoming more capable never made the uncertainty disappear.
Somehow, that first production release was shown to Anwar Ibrahim and Satya Nadella. The work traveled further than I expected; my confidence never caught up with it.
Good music and good software do the same thing to me. I can feel the care inside them, and it makes me want to create. But the better the work—and the more effortless the people behind it appear—the more I wonder whether I’m worthy of the craft. I hear how good they are, then become afraid of adding a wrong note.
I knew this pattern because I had already lived it in music. I didn’t fail by making something terrible. I failed by staying close to the craft without ever going all in, even while talented people kept making room for me.
I agreed with almost everything in Behzod Sirjani’s “You Make Music”. I knew how to choose good bandmates, join the jam, and help shape the whole. The part I couldn’t accept was its title. After all the rooms people had opened for me, I still wasn’t sure I made music.
Maybe I had put worthiness in the wrong place. Every important room in my life opened before I felt ready, and every craft asked me to participate before I felt qualified. Courage was never the feeling that arrived first. It was adding the next note while I was still afraid it would be wrong.
That is why I love quiet nights of building. A quiet night doesn’t cure my stage fright; it removes the stage. There is no audience and no need to prove that I belong. There is only the thing in front of me, the pleasure of listening closely, and one more chance to make it better.
Many of those nights leave no artifact: projects that never reach my GitHub, not even as private repositories; music lost to time; sessions I will never hear again. Maybe making them was still enough. For a while, I listened closely and added the next note.
I used to think being a listener kept me outside the craft. Maybe it was what brought me in. It taught me to notice the care, hear what needed shaping, and appreciate the people who had made it. Perhaps that is why they kept inviting me into rooms before I felt worthy.
I’m grateful that listening gave me a way to participate—in music and in software. Every product is another chance to turn care into something people can use and, in some small way, shape what comes next. I still get stage fright. I still make mistakes. But I can say it now: I make music and software.