I have spent ten years making music without learning to play an instrument. This was not a strategy. It was, however, repeatable.
In 2016, when I was sixteen, I was collaborating with Dangdut Academy stars and people from Bandung’s big nasyid scene. I could not play an instrument then. I still cannot. At college, the previous team put me in charge of the music club. I refused. They insisted. Apparently the job description had become experimental.
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. The experiment had acquired users.
Across both crafts, other people trusted me before I trusted myself. Their confidence opened the rooms. It did not install the feeling that I belonged inside them.
The first trial began while I was supposed to be preparing for a math exam. Instead, I was messing around with a pirated copy of FL Studio. I made a ballad for a nasyid project in a few minutes. This was poor exam preparation. It was also a song. Before I could ask whether I was worthy of making it, the thing 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. The instrument I could play was apparently everyone else’s instruments, one tiny adjustment at a time.
Looking back, people trusted me to listen to the whole piece and notice when its parts fought each other. Product work later asked for the same attention. The medium changed. The listening did not.
Software raised the stakes. I was thrust into 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 it out while it was happening. 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. Becoming more capable never made the uncertainty disappear. It only gave the uncertainty better tools.
That first production release traveled much 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 I become afraid of adding one wrong note to the entire human project.
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 going all in, even while talented people kept making room for me. Avoiding the wrong note had successfully prevented several right ones.
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 that broke my internal type checker was the title. After all the rooms people had opened for me, I make music still returned false.
I had put worthiness in the wrong place. Every important room in my life opened before I felt ready. I could not wait for courage to arrive first. Courage was not a prerequisite. If it appeared, it had to arrive after I started making the next thing while 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. The work becomes small enough to touch again.
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. By normal portfolio logic, they vanished. Making them was still enough. For a while, I listened closely and made something.
I used to think being a listener kept me outside the craft. Listening 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. They had been reading the evidence while I was still reviewing the job description.
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. I still cannot play an instrument. I still get stage fright. I still make mistakes. But ten years have returned one result: I make music and software.